Serbian Music: Yugoslav Contexts

Abstract

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 Congress 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 substantially revised; Atanasovski has provided an article on a new topic in accordance 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 aspects of Serbian music (art and popular) composed and performed during the lifetime of the Yugoslav state (1918–1991). The Yugoslav multinational frame is considered by most of our authors as of essential importance 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 establishment of that complex state? How did the competing political programmes of the different nations influence the sphere of music? How was the official cultural policy of rapprochement among the different Yugoslav 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-representation 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. In addition to the six chapters on the construction of Serbian cultura identity within Yugoslavia by Serbian scholars (‘insiders’), there are ‘outsider’ 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 Portugal on an issue concerning Serbian church music as transposed into art works, and finally a contribution from Slovenia, a former Yugoslav republic, 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 discontinuities in a country that has always viewed itself as part of European cultural space. Melita Milin