Music in Postsocialism: Three Decades in Retrospect ed. by Biljana Milanović; Melita Milin and Fanka Lajić Mihajlović

Abstract

Reviewed by: Music in Postsocialism: Three Decades in Retrospect ed. by Biljana Milanović; Melita Milin and Fanka Lajić Mihajlović Richard Louis Gillies Milanović, Biljana; Milin, Melita and Mihajlović, Fanka Lajić (eds). Music in Postsocialism: Three Decades in Retrospect. Institute of Musicology, Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Belgrade, 2020. xiii + 349 pp. Map. Illustrations. Music examples. Figures. Tables. Notes. References. Index. Available open access at <https://dais.sanu.ac.rs/handle/123456789/10158>. When it comes to scrutinizing and interpreting the myriad political, social and cultural shifts that attended the disintegration of the so-called ‘Eastern bloc’ and Yugoslavia during the late 1980s and 1990s, it would seem a truism [End Page 368] to point out that embracing a broad range of perspectives from representatives of the countries under consideration is essential to producing a nuanced understanding of the ‘postsocialist’ era. This recent publication from the Institute of Musicology at the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts (SASA) does precisely that, featuring a collection of fifteen essays by authors from Kazakhstan, Georgia, Russia, Ukraine, Lithuania, Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Croatia and Slovenia. The representation of such a range of voices is valuable in a number of ways, not least because it shifts the focus from the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of the USSR in 1991 (which typically feature as the primary signifiers of the collapse of socialism in much English-language scholarship) to other key social-political moments in central and (south-)east Europe such as the ‘Mineriads’ (Mineriadă) in Romania during the 1990s, the dissolution of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY) in 1992, the ensuing war in Bosnia and Herzegovina (which, as Fatima Hadžić observes, destroyed the musical as well as social infrastructure of the country, p. 174), the Siege of Sarajevo, the NATO bombings of Yugoslavia, the redistribution of power in Serbia during the early 2000s, and other such events that musicologists in Western Europe and the United States have been somewhat slower to approach (and perhaps unwilling to confront). In doing so, the volume begins to highlight the heterogeneity of ways in which the transition to ‘postsocialism’ was experienced across Central and Eastern Europe. The volume is divided into three main sections that focus respectively on continuities between past and present, the role of festivals and institutions, and developments in traditional and popular musics. Particularly deserving of mention in this last category is Anna G. Piotrowska’s chapter on the phenomenon of Slavic metal in Poland, which closes the volume with a fascinating exploration of the intersections between Slavic mythology, religion, ritual and far-right politics in the emergent metal scene in Poland during the 1990s and 2000s, making a valuable contribution to the increasingly vibrant field of metal studies in music academia. In addition to chapters such as Piotrowska’s that focus on specific genres or aesthetics, others such as those by Valentina Sandu-Dediu and Rusudan Tsurtsumia take a broader historical approach that helps to decentralize our understanding of cultural institutions and art-music traditions in (south-)east Europe during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in countries that have been somewhat underrepresented in English-language historical musicology (in this case, Romania and Georgia respectively). One of the strongest parts of the volume is the central chapter by Jelena Janković-Beguš and Ivana Medić, which explores the ruptures and continuities in Serbian musical culture following the breakup of the SFRY through the lens of the International Review of Composers (Međunarodna tribina kompozitora) — ‘the [End Page 369] most enduring annual festival of contemporary art music in Serbia, founded in 1992’ (p. 139). The Review is described as a ‘hybrid’ of previous Yugoslav festivals, yet one that was conceived as being of importance to the (re) affirmation of Serbian national identity, whilst simultaneously being ‘a “place for escapism”, an “oasis” of beauty and “sanity” amidst the turmoil of the 1990s’ (p. 146). This suggests both a continuity with, and desire to move away from the collective Yugoslav identity of the preceding decades. Particularly resonant in this regard is an extract from Zorica Premate’s review of the festival from 1991 which characterizes postmodernism...