Author(s): Joško Caleta / Language(s): English
/ Issue: 1/2008
Over the last 30 years, klapa singing, the well-known multipart singing tradition of the coastal and island part of Dalmatia (Southern Croatia), has simply outgrown the local traditional contexts and has become an
interesting music phenomenon – a "movement". Over time, the character, music content, and style of the klapa have been dynamically modified, freely adopting new changes; the phenomenon that started as
occasional and informal exclusively older male singing transformed into organized, all age, non-gendered singing. Nowadays, this organized form of singing, because of its manner of presentation, is perceived as a style of popular rather than traditional music. The klapa's popularity is a crucial factor for the endurance and development of the klapa multipart singing style. Popularity, in this case, is the recognition of the specific vocal style of a genre within the local or broader community, in which a particular multipart singing style exists. As seems to be common throughout the Mediterranean basin, one of the multipart singing styles became a synonym for the singing of particular region, island or country. Notions such as popularity, modernity, and movement, as well as the klapa movement, klapa community, klapa world, klapa population, klapa scene – terminology that has not had much in common with the purely sonic musical characteristics of multipart singing – helped to explain the present context and status of klapa singing, the traditional multipart singing that ranges from a singing style to the particular musical movement.
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