World Music Festivals and Tourism

From its foundation in 1961 until the present day, the Guca trumpet festival has undergone significant transformations. Setting out as a small-scale cultural revival of Serbian brass orchestra tradition held annually in the town of Guca in the Dragacevo region of western Serbia, the festival has evolved over time into a great World Music spectacle. The aim of this paper is to examine how the festival has become so popular worldwide and what meanings it has acquired within the ever-changing political, socio-economic and cultural circumstances in the country. Disputes about the national heritage interpretation and representation have been further reinforced by the globalization processes and by the festival's subsequent integration into the World Music and cultural tourism market. As a result, the festival’s relationship to the issues of authenticity, tradition preservation, globalization impact, and representation politics has continued to be viewed through the familiar ‘traditional/modern’, ‘local/global’, ‘homogenization/hybridization’ dichotomies. Informed by the interrelated theoretical concepts of World Music, globalization and cultural tourism studies, and carried out through a discourse analysis of various media texts and monographs on the festival, the discussion on the above issues aims to examine the extent to which the Guca trumpet festival fits into the existing interpretations of the World Music and cultural tourism practices.