Hence its main focus and appeal reside in the brass band competition part of the program, which includes a range of awards with the First Trumpet, First Band, and Golden Trumpet being the most prestigious ones. The Guča trumpet festival, by comparison, was established in 1961 in the village of Guča in the Dragačevo region of western Serbia with the aim of reviving the vanishing Serbian brass band tradition. It was launched in 2000 as a lengthy youth protest against the Milošević regime and has since then evolved into a highly acclaimed pop spectacle in Southeast Europe. Exit is a purveyor of Western-style popular music and is based in Novi Sad, capital city of Serbia’s northern province, Vojvodina. The Exit and Guča trumpet festivals are two major music festivals in post-Milošević Serbia but very different in their origin, aesthetic form, and conceptual underpinnings. Ultimately, however, the proof of normative-value dissonance in Exit and Guča supports the argument that nation branding in these two festivals feeds back into earlier Balkanist discourse on Serbia’s indeterminate position between West and East and it does so in a way that provides little hope for alternative visions of the nation’s future. Nation branding has forged a more unified view of Exit and Guča as national brands that ostensibly improve the international image of the country but which in reality deplete both festivals of their initial cultural and political potency. It also analyzes the ways in which the principles of market economy and branding practice are being “bastardized” in both festivals, resulting in what Mladen Lazić (2003) calls normative-value dissonance. Moving away from this obsolete model of interpretation, this article examines the effects that the inception of nation branding in Serbian public discourse has produced on the local perception of each festival as well as on Serbian national identity within the broader contexts of post-socialist transition, the EU integration, and globalization. The departure point of analysis is the once-dominant national identity narrative of Two Serbias, by which Exit (as a purveyor of Western-style popular music) and Guča (as the self-proclaimed guardian of the Serbian brass-band tradition) were pitted against one another as representatives of Two Serbias, one looking towards the West, and the other towards the East.
This article looks into the nation branding phenomenon surrounding two major Serbian music festivals, Exit and Guča, in the post-Milošević era.
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