A microphone in a chandelier: How a secret recording sparks mnemonic imagination and affect

Abstract

In this study, I examine a recording of an old Slovenian choral song made in 1941 during the Fascist occupation. Recorded music, I argue, has the capacity to condense the past and to potentiate the affective mnemonic imagination of the past regardless of its mediated form. To make this argument, I investigate the recording as a temporal object that drives affective mnemohistories; modulates individual and collective experiences, expectations and interpretations; and induces mnemonic imagination. I discuss the song’s pre-recorded historical background and the technical history of the recording, and the song’s affective force in live performances as compared to the mediated experience in YouTube. The investigation of the song as a temporal object that engenders variegated, multilayered engagements with the past contributes to the debates on the study of music and memory, and the history of media technologies in the context of post-socialist memory.

Introduction

Some time ago, I found a YouTube video of an old Slovenian choral song ‘Lipa zelenela je’ (‘The Greening Linden Tree’) performed by the France Marolt Academic Choir (hereafter referred to as APZ). It was dubbed over two maps, one of occupied Slovenia during the Second World War (1941–1945), and the other of the country’s capital, Ljubljana, during the Fascist occupation (1941–1943). ¹ The song awakened in me long-dormant memories of stories that I had heard from my grandparents about the Second World War, mixed with the history I had learned in school or read about later on. These memories were interspersed with sounds and images that came to inhabit my imagination through popular culture, music and cinema, and literature. The encounter revealed the song’s mnemonic and affective power: I could imagine:see my grandfather interned in Gonars, one of the Fascist concentration camps, as well as iconic people, events, places that populated the post-war mythological, political, cultural and pop-cultural landscapes in socialist Yugoslavia and thereafter. I was immersed in audiovisual and imagined stimuli mixing with pop-cultural histories and layers of my intimate past, with feelings of loss and grief. Tears welled up and goosebumps rose on my skin.

And then came the questions: How do we relate to the past by listening to a song (from the past)? What is it that music brings from the past that interacts with our present selves? What do we inscribe into the past through musical experience? How does recorded sound contribute to condensing a historical experience? How do the resonances and intensities of the past, in the context of post-socialist memory, play out in affective rewritings of the past? And how mediated encounters aggregate, emphasise, delegitimise or eradicate individual, collective, intimate and networked memories?

To approach these questions, I embarked on an analysis of the song, departing from the frame of media memory and music studies (Daughtry, 2015; Hofman, 2020; LaBelle, 2010; Pogačar, 2015), approaching music ‘as conduit of memory’ (Spinetti et al., 2020: 3), as a temporal object (Stiegler, 2014) that drives imagination and reveals shifting meanings and uses of the song. This approach targets the complexity of the song’s sociocultural lives: its role in mnemonic imagination that Emily Keightley and Michael Pickering (2012) define as ‘the faculty that allows us to move between personal experience and social meaning’ (pp. 54, 61) and its influence on what Jan Assmann terms mnemohistory. The latter, particularly relevant in studying music and memory, is concerned

not with the past as such, but only with the past as it is remembered. [. . .] It concentrates exclusively on those aspects of significance and relevance which are the product of memory – that is, of a recourse to a past – and which appear only in the light of later readings. (Assmann in Tamm, 2015: 3)

This study is situated in the post-Yugoslav situation, characterised by the sliding out of view of the country’s history, which has been displaced by nationalist and anti-communist interpretations of the past (see Pušnik and Luthar, 2020; see also Dujisin, 2020). This situation is marked by a drive to complete the ‘unfinished revolution’ (Mark, 2010), an ‘idea that communists retain a toxic and persisting influence over contemporary democratic institutions and that these communists should be removed from public life’ (Dujisin, 2020), ² which influence political power balance and media discourses. Hence, the article aims to contribute to the field by focusing on an object that in its ideological indeterminacy transgresses clearly defined interpretative positions (see also Pogačar, 2020). True, the analysis of one song and its recording may not be easily generalised. However, what makes it a worthwhile object of study is that the song fuses the singularity of a historical moment and the act of recording, and thus reframes the wartime resistance, post-war socialist and post-socialist histories in contemporary mnemonic imagination and mnemohistory. Thus, it will facilitate insight into how re-presenced components of past events are affectively reinterpreted, reimagined and repurposed in the present.

Methodologically, the analysis combines discourse analysis, ethnographic approach (due to the pandemic situation, interviews were conducted over email and phone), social media analysis and the qualitative analysis of comments about several renditions of the song on YouTube. This allows for tracing affectivity in different media/experiential settings and probing whether the affective potential of music alters over time and with changes in media technologies and related listening practices.

In what follows, I will argue that recorded music as a temporal object and mnemohistorical conduit has the capacity to potentiate affective mnemonic imagination of the past regardless of its mediated form. I will discuss the pre-recorded historical background of ‘The Linden’, the technical history of the recording and the song’s capacity to induce a musical universe. Then I will move on to the question of affect (Brennan, 2004; Massumi, 2015) in live-performance settings and discuss the transition from live performance to mediated experience in different mnemohistorical aspects, analysing user engagement with the song on YouTube (Karatzogianni and Kuntsman, 2012; Sampson et al., 2018). The analysis of the song as a mediated temporal object that engenders variegated, multilayered engagements with the song and the past aims to advance the study of music and memory in the context of the history of media technologies, a field that has been under-researched in the context of post-socialist memory practices.

Music and its mnemonic power

To understand the past, scholars and others study material sources, objects, personalities, processes, written and oral testimonies, arts and popular culture. Text and image are generally prioritised over sound: ‘The ability to record conversations, commands, intentions, and ideas in writing, and to visualize events, ceremonies, impressions and feelings in images is justly regarded as a mark of intellectual progress in history’ (Müller, 2012: 446). Jürgen Müller (2012: 446) suggests that the reason historians cannot hear the sounds of the past is in part because many of these sounds have vanished, which is why the history of audible past is often neglected. Emily Keightley and Michael Pickering (2006) argue that the visual and the auditory should not be approached and understood as two distinct realms, but rather alongside each other in order ‘to counter the visualist bias in media studies and approximate more closely to the lived realities of these two media in their promiscuous intermingling’ (p. 150; see also Pickering and Keightley, 2015) at the interstices of sound, imagination and the enabling materiality (Bennett and Janssen, 2016).

The disregard of sound in researching the past, then, can be attributed to its ephemerality and the fact that before the proliferation of sound-recording technologies (Katz, 2004; Stakelon, 2009; Zielinski, 2019), sound was destined to oblivion unless ‘preserved’ as notation. Recording technology enabled sound (voice and music) to be uprooted from time and saved for posterity (almost) as performed (Stakelon, 2009). Past sounds could thus be brought to the present, co-constructing the aural architecture of imagining and understanding the past (see Roy, 2018: 13). In addition to voice and music, technical capture of sound also makes audible the inscription of the physical characteristics of a recording and its surrounding sounds, thus contributing to the immediacy of aural pastness (Daughtry, 2013; Katz, 2004; Sterne, 2003: 327). Such peripheral sounds – the interference of the sliding of the needle on the record or the electrostatic hiss on magnetic tape, print-through, the wear-and-tear on the record or equipment (Daughtry, 2013: 8; Katz, 2004: 25) – become historically and imaginatively relevant indices of the passage of time and its pastness. What is more, accidental capture of sounds – such as the sound of the train entering the recording (Pickering, 2012: 31), or as I discuss below, the sound of a moving chair or a cough – presents an aural surplus of the past. Such surplus, arising out of accidental eavesdropping on the past (Pickering, 2012: 28), modulates mnemonic imagination. Thus, it is not only the recorded music but the intruding historical sonic indexicality, ‘enclosed within the same repeatable product of the technology’ (Pickering, 2012: 33), that brings the past closer and, paradoxically, also distances us from the past.

How then to approach music, a song in our case, as a source of mnemonic imagination? One way is by understanding it as a temporal object. For Bernard Stiegler (2014: 17), an object is temporal ‘to the extent that it is constituted by the flow of its passing, as opposed to an object like a piece of chalk, which is constituted through its stability, by the fact that it does not flow’ (see also Stiegler, 2011). The emphasis on revealing in passing, or as Elodie A. Roy (2015: 11) notes, on ‘ceaselessly vanishing as it is played’, is crucial here because it emphasises the object’s temporal properties: the song lives while it lasts and it lives off the memory of what had just passed. And yet, it also alludes to the future, existing at the interstices of experience and expectation (see Koselleck, 2004). Music thus provides a template for what Keightley and Pickering (2012: 75) term mnemonic imagination: ‘an active synthesis of the past, present, and future, which results in the creative production of new ways of understanding the past [. . .] as it is lived, retrospectively considered, and retroactively assessed’. In this, recorded music in its repeatability is endowed with a nearly prophetic function, predicting a certain combination of tones or a certain note sounding out of tune (Katz, 2004: 25), deciphering fate before it occurs, announcing death and disappearance (Roy, 2018: 4).

In order to explore music’s affective and mnemonic power, I will investigate ‘The Greening Linden Tree’ formally (lyrics and sound, history, the technical conditions of reproduction) as well as in its capacity to trigger imagination, that is, to render visual representations of the past as well as induce emotions in the listener’s listening mode (musical universe). The focus on music as symbolic and technical, political and cultural, as well as physical force, allows us to grasp affectivity outside the directly rationalisable and explainable, and yet decidedly intimate. This plays an important role in a song’s experientiality – directly interwoven with individual memories or personal histories – as well as in the expectations, desires and bodily reactions it provokes. A case in point is the reaction to a combination of tones, lyrics and memories, known as cutis anserine. A user expressed this in the comment section of the video of the US Army Band ‘Pershing’s Own’ (2019) performing ‘The Linden’: ‘Woow, well done guys, got goosebumps!!’ (see Egermann et al., 2011; Kreutz et al., 2008).

Looking for mnemonic power and affectivity, then, starts by asking how encounters with media ‘engage senses and affects (emotions, feeling, passions) and, hence, have effects . . . Affects, in this sense, pose questions about the links between the subjective and the cultural, individual and social, self and other, inside and outside’ (Koivunen in Hillis et al., 2015: 3). It continues with an investigation of the mnemonic and affective power of music, often expressed through enjoyment and pain, or loss and grief (see Hofman et al., 2020: 61).

A pre-recorded historical background

‘The Linden’ was written in the mid-nineteenth century by Miroslav Vilhar (1818–1871), a Slovenian poet, dramatist and composer. The music was composed by Davorin Jenko (1835–1914). The popular song fit well into the tradition of the linden tree as a symbol of Slovenian identity, and was widely performed by various choirs and consistently interpreted in patriotic and ethnonational terms. ³ The fact that until that December evening of 1941 it could only have been reproduced in vivo implies that historical records about its prior lives are primarily those cherished by the classic historian: reviews and performance announcements. For example, a 1934 review of an APZ concert emphasises the importance of the ‘tone formation, breathing, levelling of registers, vocalisation, [. . .] without which such beautiful singing is impossible. All voices merge into one, and the intonation is clean’ (Puš, 1934). The review was published at the time of rising Nazism and Fascism, and the generally unstable political and economic situation in pre-war Europe and the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. This provides some context to the focus on the quality of the singing:

Songs like those sang by APZ should be presented outside of our borders! These are our values, not the featureless products of our musicians who have lost almost all contact with their homeland and its art, and are floating in the powerful currents of international music. (Puš, 1934)

The review also emphasises the sincere connection between the choir and the audience that alludes to the power of live performances. It can be read as a rudimentary depiction of the affectively constructed (or desired) idea of the future of a nation, coupled with an emphasis on homeland and art, and especially the question of ‘suitable’ art, thus transposing the choir into the affective realm of nationhood. As the Second World War drew closer, ethnomusicologist Zmaga Kumer (1991: 16) notes, the choir provided a frame for the situation, and ‘The Linden’ became an important song because of the desire of a small nation to prove that its culture is as important as that of its larger neighbours, especially that of the Germans, who in pre-war Slovenia were a politically and economically significant actor.

During and after the Second World War, the song was canonised in the repertoire of partisan songs along with labour and combat songs (see Hofman and Pogačar, 2017; Križnar, 2020). However, contrary to the explicit ideological framing found in other wartime songs, ‘The Linden’ was not exclusively incorporated into the anti-Fascist tradition. For example, Božidar Fink (2004), a member of APZ who was a member of Nazi-Fascist collaboration units during the Second World War, recalled in a letter written in 2004 that not all choir members shared his moral stance and political orientation: ‘As much as [the performance] raised everyone’s courage, so it did mine, but not in the direction that the Communist leadership [of the resistance] was apparently hoping for’.

This can be attributed to its emotionally and metaphorically rich lyrics, its romantic ethnonationalism embedded into arboreal symbolism that simultaneously appeals to the Blut und Boden mythology as well as to anti-Fascist and socialist inclusivity: the natural cycles of greening, blooming and waning are affectively translated into the growth of the nation on the verge of overcoming great ordeals. To illustrate, some lyrical highlights are as follows:

Her branches spread apart,/Reaching deep inside my heart,/And to the heaven in the sky,/Her branches reach so very high. [. . .]Now the poor linden tree,/Is wilted and bare,/Her flowers and leaves,/Winter takes from her.[. . .]Slumber, dear sweet love!/But only sleep for now,/Soon the new spring will come,/And blossoms from the bough./The birds too will come again,/Those little birds so gay,/They’ll sing their sweet songs to us,/Warbling all the day. (Vilhar, 2004: 169)

The melody, melancholy but resolute, builds dramatically from quiet singing and a slow tempo towards a vocal crescendo at the end. Mitja Gobec (November 2020, Email interview), a sound engineer and former APZ singer, noted,

Any performance of the song is without doubt a result of to the singers’ moods and spirits, the atmosphere, and also the general environment. In terms of character, it fits neatly with the moods and feelings of Slovenians; the historical memory of Slovenian fate and history are built into it.

The recording

The recording of ‘The Linden’ technically enabled not just the future media lives of the song but also a mnemohistorical condensation of a specific historical moment that marked the history of Slovenian resistance against Nazism and Fascism. It was recorded secretly on 12 December 1941 at the France Marlot Academic Choir’s last performance until after the war ⁴ (for more on the choir’s history, see Moličnik et al., 2006). Electroacoustic engineer, Rudi Omota (1910–2008), one of the key innovators in Slovenian/Yugoslav pre-war radio and post-war cinema and television, had hid a microphone in a chandelier in the concert hall to capture and record the sound using a tone camera he invented. He used 150 metres of film he had sliced in half to get more length (Gobec, 2011). During the concert, risking his life, he locked himself in a room behind the screen to monitor the recording process. He remembered hearing the audience ‘tune in’: ‘When Jenko’s “The Linden” was sang, the audience roared and a loud sadness sounded; it can clearly be heard in the recording, a bitter companion of the time, heralding struggle and death. The event shocked me to bits’ (Omota in Bojc, 2016). Omota, clearly affected by the performance, recalled (and in recalling overwrote the event with future knowledge and affective remembering) his unease when he realised that just as ‘The Linden’ was about to be sung (because of its power, it was usually sang last):

the reel was growing ever thinner. Would there be enough? They were extending the song, slowly, slowly, to yet another crescendo. What if the reel runs out right in the middle of ‘The Linden?’ The song ended, the applause was heard, and the end of the film fluttered loose. (Omota in Štader, 2004)

Thus, ‘The Linden’ was successfully recorded, documented and archived.

Omota’s feat constitutes ‘The Linden’ as a technical temporal object that separated the sound from the performance (Stakelon, 2009: 300). The recorded song – detached from the human (singer/choir, listener), uprooted from the conditions of that specific live performance, free from the unpredictability (errors, variations) – will never again be free from its enabling materiality (e.g. recorder, playback device): it will always refer to that December evening at the beginning of the war. Thus, the recording’s constitutive and circumstantial materiality affected the history of the Second World War in Slovenia as well as the song’s futures. What’s more, it showed how radically affective engagement with music and the past (Daughtry, 2015; LaBelle, 2010; Pickering, 2012) is bound by its enabling technical conditions: the type of recording equipment, the capacity of a material record or tape, the mode of reproduction and the engagement with devices.

The musical universe

Discussing a recording (temporal object), mnemonic imagination and affect, it is important to emphasise the capacity of music to induce in listeners a musical universe in which their mnemonic imagination ‘provides [them] with the capacity to turn around and “re-feel” [an] experience’ (Kheightley and Pickering, 2012: 68). The concept of the musical universe – always refracted through and embedded in the listeners’ social and individual memories – is derived from Michel Chion’s discussion about the relationship between pop songs and cinema. Chion based his argument (Chion, 2000) on the specific characteristics of typical pop song – usually about 3 minutes long (the capacity of single record) – with an overture, a peak and an ending; it can be played over time and again, retaining form and content (repetition), while the song’s repetitive structure (intro, stanza, refrain, stanza, close) enables different words to stick to the music, emphasising the arbitrariness of the lyrics/music relationship (see also Pogačar, 2021). Thus, it arrests temporal linearity and reinforces the impression of recurrence. In its finitude and revealing-in-passing, the song functions as a transitory space between the listener’s intimate ‘universe’ and exteriority, as a sonic structure of imagination, inhabited by historical, mnemohistorical, pop-cultural images and sounds to which individuals and collectivities affectively react.

In this context (and in addition to mnemonic imagination), I find Chiara Bottici’s (2016) term ‘imaginal’ useful. She defines it as that which is made of images, a product of the entanglement of individual faculty and the social context. It refers to an aspect of imagination that emphasises the visual aspect of imagination, whereas imagination itself emphasises the process of imagining. Although Kheightley and Pickering (2012: 50) claim that ‘dealing with memory exclusively in terms deriving from visual perception results in a delimited and distorted conception’, Bottici’s emphasis on the centrality of images in the case of musical memory is productive: the imaginal makes no assumptions about the status of the visual as reality or fiction (Bottici, 2016), but rather constitutes the conditions and the set-up whereupon a mesh of historical and mnemohistorical audiovisuals operate and modulate intimate, affective mnemonic processes. The imaginal is tied to rhythm and melody, meanings and words, the technical and material conditions of sound, and the listeners’ intimate histories always already embedded in the wider historical and geopolitical contingencies (LaBelle, 2010). These are grafted on ideological-educational constructions of the past as well as mediated images and sounds retained from dwelling in media culture (e.g. cinema, literature). It is from within the entanglement of the aural and the visual that the imaginal contributes to inducing a musical universe and to powering its capacity to condense the past.

The musical universe emerges out of mnemohistorical reconstruction of historical events, which not necessarily entails chronological ordering of content sourced from individual’s memory, factual knowledge and popular culture. What’s more, the mnemohistorical and its technical condition (the recording equipment and the recording) constitutes the mnemotechnical: in our case, the 1941 recording constitutes a mnemotechnical device, a replayable memory aide, the infrastructure of an intimately constructed musical universe. Hence, songs can be understood as ‘(s)ymbolic places that provide orientation in the continuum of history’ (Müller, 2012: 447). In this context, ‘The Linden’ is an example of a powerful emotive force that lyrically and melodically envelops the senses in the domain of (trans)ideologically framed belonging, manifested in different uses of the song and the different effects it has on listeners. ⁵ In its ideological indeterminacy, ‘The Linden’ presents a mnemohistorical tool appropriated across the political and mnemonic spectrum, which leaves open a space of intimate and collective mnemonic imagination.

Mediated mnemonic encounters

But how does the effect of live performance and listening change in relation to endlessly reproducible yet unlive captured sounds and their mnemonic indexicality? Omota may have ‘recorded away’ the uniqueness of the performance, instead making accessible a remediation of what time had made utterly inaccessible. Nevertheless, the song’s technical existence in time affords us, in its future, an audible document of a historical time, a re-presencing of an assortment of otherwise lost sounds. In addition to the song, we can also hear, as noted above, the sounds of moving chairs and audience members’ coughing. In a live performance, such peripheral sounds could be easily ignored, but technical recording makes them part of the source, adding to the mediated liveness and affect, the feeling or Zeitgeist of an age. More importantly, hearing music in isolation (especially through headphones; Sterne, 2003: 87) foregrounds peripheral sounds that penetrate the experience of the music itself and affect the narrative or textual screen that usually delimits how we understand and imagine the past. In their time-arresting, musical universe-spawning capacity, recorded sounds expose the listener to presumably authentic sonic stimuli that drive mnemonic imagination.

Omota’s recording, which lets us eavesdrop on the past, is constituted as a document of the event, but it is also a document of changing interpretations of the past that resurface in each subsequent replay. Its power resides not only in capturing the song but also the sounds of the audience. Because of the absence of available photo documentation of the event, the peripheral sounds further add to the recording’s imaginal value (see Pogačar, 2021). These sounds come to the fore and add a degree of immediacy, akin to, but also distant from, the immediacy characteristic of live performances. They construct a feeling (its ontological status being irrelevant here) of authenticity, realness, the immediacy of the past, indeed of the event itself.

After the war and after the recording event, the song remained an important part of choral repertoires and remains one of the most emotively remembered songs among APZ’s members. Mitja Gobec (November 2020, Email interview) recounts that the singers treated it with particular respect, as valuable musical heritage from the nineteenth century. Another former singer in the choir, Sinja Zemljič Golob, had a special relationship with the song from very early on. She recounts that the song, entangled in her family history and thus in wider historical flows and events, still fills her with pride, particularly when she remembers the story of the 1941 concert: attending Italian officers rose up and left the show (a highly visually evocative description), having realised that they had allowed and participated in a subversive act of resistance. She also told me that, after the show, her grandfather, a security guard at the event, would later recount how people stood around the entrance and he no longer felt like a security guard but simply like a Slovenian (Zemljič Golob, December 2020, Telephone interview). It is difficult to code in words the emotions with which this was narrated, the proud voice itself acting as animating agent driving the imagining of singing and the audience, conjuring up a scent of ‘history in the air’, and probably some cigarette smoke after the performance as well. This illustrates the song’s affective ‘stickiness’ to adapt Sara Ahmed’s (2014) concept who notes that ‘histories are bound up with emotions precisely insofar as it is a question of what sticks, of what connections are lived as the most intense or intimate, as being closer to the skin’ (p. 54). In this context, stickiness refers to intimately ordered historical events and memories whose internal structure and meaning (mnemohistory) openly and fluidly accommodates individual affective processes, untethered from facticity, time or space.

By the 1980s, a period of political and economic crisis for the Yugoslav project, the song’s anti-Fascist and Yugoslav/socialist historical frameworks along with its mythical and cultural trajectories had waned. This is exemplified in the rendition of the song by the Yugoslav/Slovenian rock band Lačni Franz. The frontman, Zoran Predin, retained the title but completely changed the melody and lyrics. He replaced the ethnonational arboreal symbolism with a story about a girl ran over by a truck, and her classmates who were required to sing ‘The Linden’ at her funeral while looking at the girl’s corpse in the coffin (Lačni Franz, 1983; Urednik, 2016). This ironic and triste musical twist structures the imaginal by incorporating and subverting the song’s histories, and comments on the ideological and political impasse of late socialism, rather than directly voicing opposition to the anti-Fascist narrative or condoning nationalism as such (see Kopeček and Wciślik, 2015; Mark, 2010; Ramet, 1994; Spaskovska, 2017). Predin took a meaning-laden title (and with it the song’s long history) and juxtaposed it with images of a dead teenager and disheartened, even disgusted youth, suggesting how the ideology of socialist Yugoslavia’s was hopelessly out-of-sync with youth and historical changes. The ‘desecration’ of the song thus exemplifies a generational and ideological shift, with the younger generation framing ‘their experiences through the narrative of the generation that “lost”: its freedom, dignity, and superiority to the countries of the former eastern Bloc’ (Spaskovska, 2017: 504). At the same time, the 1980s saw the rise of a democratisation movement and the linden mythology was repurposed once again in nationalist terms, if only for a limited time, in a television tourism campaign and in the Slovenian independence project (Kos, 2011; Paternost, 1992). The recording itself, kept today in the archives of Radio Slovenia, seemed to have largely disappeared from public life and found refuge in individual mnemohistories.

Towards technical networks

Performed live, a song can be understood as an affective conduit with singers forming a singing body, the audience another kind of body and all fusing together into an ebbing aggregate of bodies and sounds, experiences, expectations and memories. As demonstrated by the review and the memories quoted above, music is an immersive medium in its capacity to modulate emotions and mnemonic imagination. Listeners to live music, drenched in sound, sweat and tears, were in a sense ‘networked before the Internet’, albeit in a network that is distinctly different in both scale and type, spatially and temporally. A live song constitutes a dynamic infrastructure of commonality, manifested in overlapping physical aspects (proximity, temperature, exhaled air) and affective aspects (immersion in a group, pulse, tears, cutis anserine). These aspects structure the dynamics of entangled emotive and physical/bodily reactions constituted through shared participation in spatiotemporally synchronised audiovisual dimensions of performance and experience (see Sterne, 2003: 284). Thought:action and body:action thus partake in a network of self-reinforcing ‘complex feelings and gut reactions that refuse any dualistic distinctions’ (Hillis et al., 2015: 3).

But what happens to music’s (mnemonic) power once it has been recorded, technically mediated, digitised? Technologically enabled sound recording arguably dissociates the performance and listeners (Stakelon, 2009), depriving them of the visual experience of the performance. This allows for other visual sources (e.g. album covers, photographs, films, memories, everyday experience) to fuse with the experience of listening, memories and expectations, and to influence the process of imagination. With the mass proliferation of digital media since the late 1990s, digital listeners have been confronted with the visual much more directly. Today, digital listeners may partake in a mediatised and mediated, spatially and temporally fragmented, yet still shared – through shared consumption of the same or similar content – experiential space (here, we leave aside the debate about the ontological difference between analogue and digital recordings; Rothenbuhler and Peters, 1997; Sterne, 2003). As I discuss in the rest of the article, this indicates that physical proximity is not necessary for music to ‘move us’. Music moves us regardless and, as it does, it refracts individual mnemonic processes and envelops the sensoriality of being to inscribe the solitary listening act into a mediated collectivity: while the imaginal may be confined to the interior, it is always recursive to the exterior.

In its future lives, the 1941 recording of ‘The Linden’ acquired a different status: it became the original and it acquired, as did the event of which it was part, the aura of singularity, arising from the fact that any new technology affords a previous one the status of truthful representation. It was coded as real (Rodowick in Cohen, 2012: 529), although even the original, as an artefact or carrier, is never materially fixed. The quality of sonic artefact reveals the double imprint of time, time as corrosive agent in the advancing deterioration of the recording (e.g. the intrusion of print-through, the decay of the material) and the historical time revealed in the historico-technical characteristics of the recording (e.g. the pronounced lower and missing middle ranges and peaking highs, as well as various peripheral sounds). Introducing a human factor, Mitja Gobec (November 2020, Email interview) recounted that after the war he ‘cleaned’ the original as best he could of the coughs and hisses and other peripheral sounds, thus further affecting the audible characteristics of the recording. His desire to polish the artefact improved the sound quality of the recording, yet it also interfered with the preservation of circumstantial historical sonic evidence.

Videos, songs, memory

The cleaned 1941 recording began another life on December 14, 2014, as a digital video memorial, one among a number of interpretations of the song on YouTube. Digital video memorials converge sound, images and text as expressions of affective re-presencing of the past and affective user reactions (Pogačar, 2016: 151). This makes them valuable research material yielding insight into how the past is affectively referenced and re-presenced in user made videos and interactions devoid of apparent circumstantial factors (venue, event, physical proximity of others). Furthermore, such videos provide insight into the temporally and spatially disjointed life of the song affectively framed in user interaction, outside its immediate historical context or live-performance setting. In this context, mediated interaction among users and with content also facilitates encounters with past events and exteriorisation of intimate, affective mnemohistories. Below I discuss the reverberations of several variations of ‘The Linden’ among listeners on YouTube to explore whether the encounters reveal similar affects as the original live performance that opened this article.

In response to the 1941 video memorial, a user commented: ‘So far no one has sung it from the heart and soul as the Marolt Choir did!’ This suggests that the listener was touched by the very same sequence of tones, the symbolism of lyrics, as were the people present at the concert some 75 years ago, whose imagined experience is affectively inscribed, imagined, by the user into the longer mnemohistory of the song, evoked by the digital listener. The listener, on the basis of the 1941 performance’s future histories, acknowledged the performative superiority clearly measured against the many future renditions. Another user commented, ‘A Slovenian song. You will never know what this song means to Slovenians’. This comment reveals the sticky moment that allows for open, trans-ideological identification and inscription of memory and the future. It alludes to an implicit, culture-specific knowledge of the past as a precondition to interpellate the listener into the song’s ever-new experiential and experienced presents, and imagined pasts.

In March 2020, the previously mentioned US Army Choir published their rendition of ‘The Linden’. Commentators are predominantly Slovenian or with Slovenian background, the vast majority of whom were apparently deeply touched by the performance: ‘For a native USA listener this probably just sounds nice . . . but for a born Slovenian – this touches the very soul. Troopers, perhaps better U didn’t understand those lines – man in tears can’t sing so good’. Response: ‘[. . .] nobody could have described this as accurately as you did. And it is true, no one can understand what is being sung but a true Slovenian!’ Many commentators are effusively thankful to the choir, which in combination with reports of goosebumps and tears, markers of the song’s affective force, demonstrates that in a networked setting transmission of affect is an ongoing phenomenon that unfolds both in listeners and through their textual engagement with others:

OMG, this brought tears to my eyes. An excellent performance of this song of resilience and hope in times of hardship. [. . .] A symbol of how we are all much more alike than different, that reaches out across the distance and touches people’s hearts. You’ve forged a beautiful connection with this. – Exactly what we need during these Corona virus times. Thank you for this, and stay safe and God bless you. (From an Aussie Slovene currently in lockdown with her family amid the beautiful Slovenian countryside)

Here, we detect a reproduction of the emotionally framed arboreal symbolism, perhaps all the more powerful for a (homesick) emigrant enduring double displacement during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown. In isolation, networked music clearly overcomes spatial and temporal distances and provides emotional relief through invoking intimate memories and the reaffirmation of both the song and listener as part of Slovenian history: ‘This is the history of Slovenian nation. Regardless of divisions’. In terms of history, this short comment concisely condenses the overall relevance of the song: it not only points out historical ethnonationalism and ongoing political polarisation but also expresses the song’s trans-ideological appeal. Overall, discourse analysis of the comments shows they are decidedly reconciliatory:

Excellent performance. Great respect. This song is [. . .] a song of great trouble, hope and resistance, told through the emotional and highly symbolic linden tree story. It’s most famous performance was that of APZ France Marolt on 12 December 1941 in Unionska dvorana in Ljubljana, under Italian occupation. There was so much emotion and resistance in this legendary performance!

Referring to the very recording that inspired this article, the comment reveals how listeners navigate and network between the different versions of the song, weaving them into an immersive musical universe. Rehearing and re-experiencing different versions also suggest that the imagination of the past is enhanced through overlapping and comparing different temporal and historical (listening) contexts.

I suggested above that the song has had a trans-ideological, if not necessarily unifying, appeal throughout its history. It is a sticky cultural element readily employed – due to its symbolic rootedness and arboreal metaphoricity (birth, growth, death) – in ethnomythical narratives to emphasise not only the feelings of national hardship and marginalisation but also pride and national unity. Thus, the song ‘sings’ across the ever-present ideological/political divide, suggesting that in the context of the Second World War and the post-war period, it provided an ethnonational resource that consoled ‘both’ sides. It appears to mitigate the often explicit animosity between the proponents of resistance and collaboration during the Second World War, abundant in comments under other Second World War–related YouTube videos and other digital content (see Pogačar, 2020). Given the song’s relevance as an ethnonational and historical marker, a more polemical engagement was expected, particularly below the 1941 recording, and especially in the context of individual memories and the collective trauma engrained in the politicised echoes of the Second World War in Slovenia today. Instead, the responses lack the contours of an ideological battle. What does this interactive and ideological pacifism say about memory, affect and digital media?

Analysis suggests that the main topics that engage listeners and their senses are love for homeland and respect for the song and the nation’s resilience, which are often framed in intimate memories. A user commented below the digital recording of a performance of ‘The Linden’ by a Slovenian octet: ‘This song was sung at my dad’s funeral =(./This song was very much loved by my dad = (/And I used to sing it in a choir =(.’ Response: ‘Be proud of your dad and remember him with joy, follow in his steps, I’m sure they’re the right ones’. The exchange on one hand reveals the place and importance of the song in a family history and its embeddedness in intimate histories. On the other hand, the response also alludes to the symbolic and historical relevance of the song, suggesting to other listeners/viewers that the moral quality of a person is tied to the song’s potent, sticky (mnemo)histories. To refer again to Mitja Gobec’s observation that the song has historical memory and history built into it, we can see the interweaving of (personal) experience and (collective) expectation, as well as the inevitable taking affective recourse to the past in the processes of mnemonic imagination. The latter crafts a new space of experience and horizon of expectation that, Reinhardt Koselleck notes (in Keightley and Pickering, 2012: 67, 69) in ‘ever-changing patterns(,) brings about new resolutions and through this generates historical time’.

The song’s ideological indeterminacy suggests that ‘The Linden’ was never a divisive song. Although not necessarily a universal ethno-connective tissue, it functioned as a trans-ideological sonic exteriorisation of the Slovenian ethno-myth that could readily be used to frame any ideological position, anti-Fascist resistance or Nazi-Fascist collaboration. As I have shown, the song acquired for generations of listeners after the war many different meanings and then nearly disappeared from public life as symbolically and mythically obsolete. Today, regardless of listeners’ ideological orientations, this mnemotechnical device moves between personal experience and social meaning, geopolitical contexts and time. The song thus opens up and seizes the space of ideological indeterminacy to rearticulate, and mask, the historical and mnemonic divide by re-actualising the ethnonational mythical background. In its openness, it is intimately relatable for many listeners, allowing in the process of mnemonic imagination the employment of intimate memories to form imaginal, affectively co-constructed audiovisual snippets of the past. As such, the mnemonic imagination frames and structures the various arboreal mythologies that branch off into both liberal-to-leftist and anti-Fascist, right-wing conservative traditions, all claiming transhistorical relevance.

Conclusion

In this article, I have examined ‘The Linden’ as a temporal object in its journey from an unrecorded choral song to a qualitatively different technical temporal object. I have argued that recorded music has the capacity to condense the past, stemming from music’s power to drive mnemonic imagination and facilitate the emergence of a musical universe, arising out of historical, mnemohistorical, pop-cultural images and sounds to which individuals and collectivities affectively react, invariably bringing in their intimate feelings and histories. Thus, I demonstrated that historical affect is not only transferred in live performances but, with the help of mnemonic imagination, in networked environments as well.

The analysis of the song demonstrated the complexity of techno-cultural dynamics intersecting in the object that condenses 150 years of Slovenian history: from romantic nationalism to resistance during the Second World War, its shifting roles in late socialism until the present day. As such, ‘The Linden’ can be read as a condensation of Slovenian history, patriotism, nationalism, anti-Fascist resistance; always already recursively inflected by the imaginal induced in individuals rehearing, re-living, reimagining, reconnecting. It is clear that the song is symbolically pliable enough to transcend the ideological divisions in Slovenia. This can be deduced from the users’ comments on different versions of the song on YouTube, which hardly engage in the ideological, left/right confrontation characteristic of other content related to the Second World War or socialism.

Importantly, by making music or a song a reproducible temporal object and mnemotechnical device, the recording and media technology in fact change the song’s lives, uses and meanings. Unlike a live performance that changes with each new instantiation and can never be revisited, recorded music (although never accessible in the same way) repeatedly re-presences the feel of the past and reinforces the suspension of time. In this case, the technical reproducibility of the snatched-out-of-time snippet of history not only leaves us with a sonic document of the time that became part of a longer history but also with a sonic archive of a symbolically laden event that took place in occupied Ljubljana in 1941. This is comprised of the song and the peripheral sounds caught on tape that, brought into the present, reference and construct a specific historical moment and recursively shape how we think about the past through music.

In this view, the post-socialist mnemonic situation provides a background to the song’s affective power, ‘technically arrested’ in the recording of a live performance that keeps present the memory of the Second World War. While these events, framed in the legacies of socialism, anti-Fascist resistance and contemporary political divisions, still fuel the ‘unfinished revolution’ in Slovenian politics and culture, the record ultimately shows that some technical and cultural artefacts can bring listeners or users closer in a musical, imaginal universe, if at the price of forgetting the constitutive and painfully divisive historical events and their future relevance.

As a temporal object, and this is valid beyond the investigated object and its geographical, historical or political contexts, a recorded song, or rather its musical universe, collapses time and contexts, drives affective mnemohistories and modulates individual and collective experiences, expectations and interpretations. This breaks the granularity of thinking about (and indeed imagining) the past down to the tiniest details, such as the sound of a moving chair or a cough, which in this recording attained (mnemo)historical value. As such, they bring the past closer while reiterating it being irretrievably lost. What’s more, a recording, as a source of (accidentally caught) historical sounds, modulates affective, intimate, emotional imagining of the past, which is always refracted through the lenses of the present’s failures and desires, as well as memories and potential futures.

Finally, the imaginal relationship to the past through music may invite us to imagine more intimately the people that produced peripheral sounds, their life stories, their fates. Thinking about history through music can thus be an encouragement to delve into the complexities of a historical moment through sound usually absent from historical accounts; we may define an ethics of respect for protagonists immersed in the complexities of their specific and inaccessible present as historical subjects rather than mere objects of history.