Masovne pesme Josipa Slavenskog iz arhivske zbirke Fakulteta muzičke umetnosti u Beogradu. Pokušaj kontekstualizacije

Abstract

Cilj ovog rada jeste predstavljanje nekih od manje poznatih dela Josipa Slavenskog (1896. –1955.). Konkretno, reč je o kolekciji od tridesetak masovnih pesama koje se nalaze u kompozitorovoj rukopisnoj zaostavštini, a koja je na čuvanju u Biblioteci Fakulteta muzičke umetnosti u Beogradu. Odlučili smo se za ovaj izbor dela ne samo zato što smatramo da su Slavenskova dela nastala nakon Drugog svetskog rata (dakle nakon kompozitorovog stvaralačkog vrhunca dostignutog tokom tridesetih godina XX veka) manje poznata, već i da je u određenoj meri kompozitorov društveni angažman u tom periodu relativno nepoznat; razmotrićemo ga kroz nekoliko teza o kulturnoj memoriji.

In 2016 and 2017 the Serbian Musicological Society published two volumes of collected choirs by Josip Slavenski (1896–1955). The first volume contains mixed choirs, with the second containing children, female and male choirs. Although the idea was to publish collected choirs, a significant number of mass songs (excluding Partisans’ Folk Songs for mixed choir a cappella) were excluded. In the composer’s manuscript legacy, which is to be found, since 1998, at the Faculty of Music library in Belgrade, there is a collection of mass songs, circa 30, some of which were published separately in the early years after World War II. One of the reasons to exclude them from the aforementioned volumes would be the somewhat ad hoc ensembles required to perform them (choir – male, female or mixed, orchestra or piano, if available), although that cannot be considered to be a valid excuse, bearing in mind that several choirs involved in the two published volumes have overcome similar problems (noted as NB, in both manuscripts and published volumes). Therefore, in this paper we summarise the composer’s written legacy, considering the mass song collection through the prism of Jan Assman’s theory of cultural heritage. This German Egyptologist argued that there were four versions of the “outer dimensions of memory”: namely mimetic memory, object memory, communicative memory and cultural memory (Assman 2005: 22-24), whereas cultural memory, as a memory distanced from everyday life, has these characteristics: connection of identity, capacity to reconstruct, formation, organization, obligation and reflexivity (Assman 1995: 129-132). These categories are regarded as key to constructing cultural memory and have been used to indicate the potential value of several almost unknown works by Josip Slavenski. Although we do not expect a fundamental re-evaluation of the composer’s opus through this overview of these mass songs (a genre whose authors remain mostly anonymous), we would like to point to their place in the complete opus, but also to the means of discovering elements of the social context and cultural politics of that time, and, maybe, some of the composer’s personal ideological beliefs and contributions to the construction of cultural memory.