A Peasant’s Interview with a Foreign Journalist by Predrag Milosevic in relation to the question of socialist realism in Serbian music history

Abstract

Bearing in mind the position occupied by Yugoslav postwar music, in this article I review certain compositional strategies implemented by Predrag Milosevic in his piece A Peasant?s Interview with a Foreign Journalist, by means of which this modernist composer stepped into the field of socialist realism. I will analyze the score in order to identify the most significant compositional-technical strategies used by the composer. Further analyses will encompass an interpretation of the piece with respect to the theories of socialist realism, while a separate segment of this article will be dedicated to some aspects of the relationship between this composition and writings published at the time of its creation. I will then use these analyses to emphasize some points in Milosevic?s work where one can observe connections with the theoretical output of his contemporaries, as well as with recent writings that focus on understanding the place of socialist realism in Serbian music history.