The stages of modernism in Serbian music

Abstract

In order to consider this topic, it was first necessary to discuss certain problems of terminology and periodisation relating to musical modernism in general. It is already familiar the extent to which the terms "new music", "modernist", "contemporary" and "avant-garde" music have been used interchangeably, as synonyms. For this reason, it was first important to outline the period of musical modernism as almost generally accepted, which is regarded as an epoch comprising three different periods: (I) period of early modernism (1890-1918), announced by a break with later romanticism and a turn towards French Impressionism, Austro-German Expressionism and Russian "folkloric Expressionism"; (II) period of "classical modernism" (1919-1945) that witnessed a diffusion of neo-classicism and serialism; (III) period of "high modernism" (1946-1972) characterized by highly experimental compositional techniques such as integral serialism and aleatoricism. In relation to this, avant-garde movements are seen as radically innovative and subversive tendencies within this modernist epoch, and while certain postmodernist ideas can be recognized as early as the 1950s, postmodernism as a movement hadn’t gained its full potency until the 1970s. Since then, it has assumed different forms of existence as well as having assimilated a continued form of ‘modernist project’. The second part of the article proposes a periodisation of Serbian musical modernism, which is divided into four stages. The first stage (1908-1945) was a period where elements of Impressionism and German expressionism were creatively introduced into the works of several leading composers (Petar Konjović, Stevan Hristić, Miloje Milojević, Josip Slavenski, Marko Tajčević). The second stage (1929-1945) was marked by a group of composers who studied in Prague and assimilated certain progressive compositional techniques such as free tonality, atonality dodecaphony, microtonality and athematicism (Mihovil Logar, Predrag Milošević, Dragutin Čolić, Ljubica Marić, Vojislav Vučković, Milan Ristić). The third stage (1951-1970) followed immediately after the era of Socialist Realism, which involved the rediscovery of the pre- World War II Western modernism and prepared the ground for contemporary avant-garde developments almost non-existent before 1961 (Milan Ristić, Dušan Radić, Dejan Despić Vladan Radovanović, Enriko Josif, Stanojlo Rajičić, Vasilije Mokranjac Aleksandar Obradović, Ljubica Marić, Rajko Maksimović). The fourth stage (1956-1980) was the period during which the post-World War II avant-garde developments found their home amongst Serbian composers, some of them conceived almost simultaneously with but independent of the current progressive development in the rest of the world (Vladan Radovanović Aleksandar Obradović, Petar Ozgijan, Petar Bergamo, Srdjan Hofman, the group Opus 4).

Muzikolozi se često susreću sa problemima terminologije i periodizacije posebno u oblasti novije muzike.U ovom radu se raspravlja o modernizmu u srpskoj muzici, uzimajući kao kontekst muzički modernizam u svetu i različite pristupe njegovom tumačenju. S obzirom na to da je ova tema izuzetno široka selektivno i koncizno su predstavljena vladajuća shvatanja o muzičkom modernizmu, zatim je ukazano na izvesne protivrečnosti i nedoumice u korišćenju terminologije i izložen je predlog za periodizaciju modernizma u srpskoj muzici.