Playing Catch-Up: Serbian Art Music against the Odds

Abstract

This essay aims to answer the main question that this book deals with – namely, to what extent has contemporary culture been determined by multiple changes of identity forced against the will of the societies of the Central European region over the past century. I will focus on the example of Serbia, one of the countries which experienced a belated development of its cultural and, more specifically, musical life, due to unfavourable political circumstances. Ever since its modern-era (re)birth in the mid-nineteenth century, Serbian art music has been playing “catch-up” with the rest of Europe. At the same time, the country itself has undergone multiple changes of its borders, names, (con)federal organisations, constitutions and dominant ideologies, not to mention multiple wars, which have inevitably affected the development of Serbian musical life and its institutions. Due to the fact that this development was uneven, often interrupted by wars or stifled by political intervention, many composers suffered from the so-called “Shostakovich syndrome”. As defined by Jeff Simon, this phenomenon applies to composers from non-Western European countries, whose output was “too avant-garde for their native lands, but not advanced enough for the West”. Shostakovich himself was a victim of the ideological pressures and prejudices that accompanied the post-WWII global divide.