Table Of ContentSerbian Music: Yugoslav Contexts
SERBIAN MUSIC: YUGOSLAV CONTEXTS
Edited by
Melita Milin and Jim Samson
Published by
Institute of Musicology SASA
Technical editor
Goran Janjić
Cover design
Aleksandra Dolović
Number of copies
300
Printed by
Colorgrafx
ISBN
978-86-80639-19-2
SERBIAN MUSIC:
YUGOSLAV CONTEXTS
EDITED BY
MELITA MILIN
JIM SAMSON
INSTITUTE OF MUSICOLOGY
OF THE SERBIAN ACADEMY OF SCIENCES AND ARTS
BELGRADE 2014
This book has been published thanks to the financial support of the Ministry of edu-
cation, science and technological development of the Republic of Serbia.
Cover illustration: Vera Božičković Popović, Abstract Landscape, 1966. Courtesy of
Zepter Museum, Belgrade.
CONTENTS
PREFACE............................................................................................................7
Melita Milin
INTRODUCTION.............................................................................................9
Jim Samson
1. SERBIAN MUSIC IN WESTERN HISTORIOGRAPHY......................17
Katy Romanou
2. WRITING NATIONAL HISTORIES IN A MULTINATIONAL
STATE..........................................................................................................29
Melita Milin
3. DISCIPLINING THE NATION: MUSIC IN SERBIA
UNTIL 1914................................................................................................47
Biljana Milanović
4. IMAGINING THE HOMELAND: THE SHIFTING BORDERS
OF PETAR KONJOVIĆ’S YUGOSLAVISMS........................................73
Katarina Tomašević
5. THE INTER-WAR CORRESPONDENCE BETWEEN
MILOJE MILOJEVIĆ AND SLAVKO OSTERC...................................95
Jernej Weiss
6. BYZANTINE DISCOURSES IN CONTEMPORARY
SERBIAN MUSIC....................................................................................109
Ivan Moody
7. ‘A WINDOW TOWARDS THE WEST’:
YUGOSLAV CONCERT TOURS IN THE SOVIET UNION..........127
Ana Petrov
8. MUSIC OF THE LOST GENERATION:
SERBIAN ÉMIGRÉ COMPOSERS.......................................................143
Ivana Medić
5
9. FLOATING IMAGES OF YUGOSLAVISM ON THE PAGES
OF FAMILY MUSIC ALBUMS.............................................................165
Srđan Atanasovski
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS..................................................................187
INDEX............................................................................................................193
Note
Chapters 2, 3, 4, 8 and 9 were written as part of the project Serbian Musical
Identities within Local and Global Frameworks: Traditions, Changes, Chal-
lenges (no. 177004) funded by the Ministry of Education and Science of Re-
public of Serbia.
6
PREFACE
Melita Milin
The initial idea for this volume was expressed during a study session
called The Multiple Identities of Serbian Musics in Changing Geopolitical
Contexts: Views from Without and from Within, presented at the Con-
gress of the International Musicological Society, held in Rome in July
2012. Jim Samson, coordinator of the session, which consisted of four
participants from Serbia, one from Greece and one from Britain, kindly
agreed to help in preparing and editing the present book, which has a
rather different focus: Serbian music within the Yugoslav multinational
state. Four of the papers read in Rome (those by Katy Romanou, Melita
Milin, Katarina Tomašević and Biljana Milanović) have been substan-
tially revised; Atanasovski has provided an article on a new topic in ac-
cordance with the different focus of the present book; and another four
articles (by Ivan Moody, Ivana Medić, Jernej Weiss and Ana Petrov) were
newly commissioned.
As its title suggests, the volume aims to throw light on different as-
pects of Serbian music (art and popular) composed and performed dur-
ing the lifetime of the Yugoslav state (1918–1991). The Yugoslav multi-
national frame is considered by most of our authors as of essential im-
portance for the shaping of Serbian music and musical life, as indeed it
was for the music of all the other nations in Former Yugoslavia. What
kind of continuity was established with the era that preceded the estab-
lishment of that complex state? How did the competing political pro-
grammes of the different nations influence the sphere of music? How was
the official cultural policy of rapprochement among the different Yugo-
slav nations implemented in practice? How did the different nationalisms
shape musical creativity in Yugoslavia? Is it possible to speak of Yugoslav
music at all? What can musicological discourses tell us about self-repre-
sentation among the different Yugoslav nations? And how were political
tensions (communism v capitalism) reflected in popular music? These are
some of the questions which the authors of this volume attempt to address.
In order that a wider temporal context is provided, two chapters (3
and 8) focus on major developments in Serbian music before and after
the existence of Yugoslavia, thus representing a kind of temporal prelude
and postlude to the seven-decade long period of the state.
7
SERBIAN MUSIC: YUGOSLAV CONTEXTS
In addition to the six chapters on the construction of Serbian cultural
identity within Yugoslavia by Serbian scholars (‘insiders’), there are ‘out-
sider’ perspectives by scholars who have researched Serbian and Yugoslav
music. There is a contribution from Greece, exploring how Serbian music
has been dealt with in Western music historiography, another from Por-
tugal on an issue concerning Serbian church music as transposed into art
works, and finally a contribution from Slovenia, a former Yugoslav re-
public, on the correspondence between two outstanding composers of the
interwar period, a Serb and a Slovenian.
This book is the first of its kind in English. Its aim is by no means to
present a history of Serbian music from the last decades of the nineteenth
century to the present, but rather to offer fresh insights into the complex,
dynamic relationship between national continuities and state disconti-
nuities in a country that has always viewed itself as part of European cul-
tural space.
8
INTRODUCTION
Jim Samson
In Chapter 1 of this volume, Katy Romanou refers to the emergence
of a global music historiography in recent years, citing several exemplary
writings and projects. The message is that the age of national histories of
music (initiated in Germany in the nineteenth century), like the similarly
motivated, all-powerful and all-pervasive folklore movement, is finally on
the wane. Yet neither will recede quickly or gracefully. Witness the con-
tinuing folklore projects – scholarly and performative – around the edges
of Europe today. And witness too the institutionalized pedagogies that
still place the nation at the heart of cultural histories. ‘Nationalism and
the properties that created it are disintegrating’, are Romanou’s words.
Well, it will be a lengthy process.
My own contribution to the symposium of which this book is a par-
tial record was well attuned to Romanou’s argument. It was a polemical
call for a denationalization of music histories, referring not just to Serbia
but to the wider meta-region of southeastern Europe. I cited there the
pioneering multi-volume literary history edited by Cornis-Pope and
Neubauer as a possible exemplary model for musicology,1 and I went on
to propose a historiography of this region that recognized the common-
alities stemming from shared cultural substrata, from common imperial
legacies (both Habsburg and Ottoman), and, more recently, from the lure
of modern Europe. I suggested too that even the so-called national
schools of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were not ex-
empt, in the sense that each nation displayed in practice a variant of a
single bourgeois culture, while at the same time competitively elevating,
asserting and promoting its uniqueness. In other words, there was a di-
vorce between practice and discourse.
For long enough commentaries on cultural nationalism, whether by
historical musicologists or ethnomusicologists, have recognized this di-
vorce. If I were to cite just two seminal, influential texts along these lines,
1 M. Cornis-Pope and J. Neubauer (eds.), History of the Literary Cultures of East-
Central Europe: Junctures and Disjunctures in the 19th and 20th Centuries. 4 vols.
(Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2004).
9
