Serbian Composer Research Articles

Stylistic Correlations Between Serbian and European Music in the 20th Century

The Serbian musical culture was put late into connection with the European one. The fact that the first piano was introduced in Serbia in 1824 indicates that cultivating Serbian music was not possible under the Turkish domination. The spread of Serbian music in Europe made it possible to publish compositions by foreign authors and Serbian composers, which drew attention to the themes of Serbian music. The compositions were printed and published in Leipzig, Vienna, Prague, Paris, Budapest, London. The tours abroad performed by Serbian choirs and soloists popularized Serbian songs all over Europe. In the first half of the 20th century, almost 80 European composers wrote works with Serbian influences. Most of the foreign composers, especially those who lived and created among Serbians, embraced the mentality and cultural and musical needs of a people whose melodic essence they tapped into, using Serbian musical themes in their compositions. Keywords: Serbian, composition, modernity, relations, influences.

Activist Musicology and Informal Multimedia Archives: The Case of YouTube Channel “Serbian Composers”

The YouTube channel “Serbian Composers” was founded in 2012 by four musicology students from Belgrade. As the first page dedicated to both art music and applied music of Serbian composers on this popular video-sharing website, over the past 11 years this channel has shown itself to be an excellent platform for the promotion, multi-media archiving, research, digitalization, and preservation of Serbian music. The founders of the channel—nowadays active researchers in the field—recognized the potential of YouTube for applied musicological work and worked diligently on making this channel the most reliable online source for anyone interested in Serbian composers and their works. In this article, we elaborate on what working on this channel throughout the years has entailed. We cover the realities of both the social media and internet presence of one such endeavor and situate the research in the domain of seeing YouTube as an informal multimedia archive. We also discuss the ongoing processes of collecting music and data, digitalization and preservation, selection and categorization, and the presentation of material on YouTube and other relevant social media platforms.

CHURCH CHORAL SINGING IN HISTORICAL BANAT

If some very well-documented treatises have been written about Romanian choral church music from Banat, which will also support the scientific research of some of the works that will be born according to this plan, instead of Serbian church music, an integral part of church choral music from Banat, we have too little data on in the Romanian language, thus feeling, over time, the lack of specialized discussions (be it biographies or analyzes of the work of Serbian composers, musicologists or systematizers) that would become bigger and more acute, deals in depth with this important aspect of church choral music in Banat. Moreover, about how the two branches first evolved separately, then together, and again separately from the 19th century, how they influenced each other, how they passed on to their descendants an almost unchanged heritage, there are too few writings and specialty studies, which led to the decision to address this topic. Studying the work of the first known musicologists, composers and systematizers of Serbian choral church music in the 19th and 20th centuries. century (I. Marinković, Kornelije Stanković and especially St. Stojanović Mokranjac) we believe that the academic treatment of the personalities and activities of these musicians as well as the scientific presentation of their contribution in the reading, saving, preserving and transmitting all data related to Banat church music, up-to-date from the point of view of musicological research, is more than desirable. The beginnings of the choral activity of the Serbs in the Romanian Banat can be found in the fourth decade of the 19th century, first in Timisoara (1836), with the establishment of the Serbian Orthodox Cathedral Choir and the Serbian Singing Society, then in 1876. (according to some authors in 1896) Society of Serbian songs from Arad.

The Role of the Piano in Romanticism Approached by Serbian Composers

Serbian piano literature can be divided, quite meaningfully, into several categories if one takes into account the classification criteria: a) the origin of the compositions, b) the level of their content and c) the level of success of the piano performance. Piano performance survived for several decades as the only form of creative expression of Serbian citizens.

Chinese painting theory as an Inspiration: Vladimir Trmčić's two music creations on Chinese painting

This paper examines Serbian composer Vladimir Trmčić's two works inspired by Chinese painting theory during the Southern and Northern Song dynasty. An in-depth analysis of the "Chinese characteristics" expressed or hidden in the composer's works will be conducted in the context of the composer's knowledge on China. Its aims are, firstly, to gain a deeper understanding of "Chinese music" as understood by Serbian composers; secondly, to provide a "blueprint" for motivating the development of music composition on the both sides; and finally, to demonstrate the new way of communication formed in the field of ideology so as to open up the horizons of cross-cultural studies in a wider context.

The Stylistic Features of Vasilije Mokranjac’s Piano Compositions

"Vasilije Mokranjac can be seen as a paradigm for an entire generation of Serbian composers who started creating at an unfavourable historical moment. In time, he moved away from his initial stylistic ideas, and, by constant transformation of his practically neoclassical style, he created a heterogeneous work. He dealt most intensely with piano music and, as a result, he contributed the most, both quantitatively and qualitatively, to this area. Keywords: Vasilije Mokranjac, piano compositions, stylistic "

Recycling Postmodernism. Trendsetters, Trends and Pandora, Double Concerto for Viola, Cello and Chamber Orchestra (2022) by Lazar Đorđević

Pandora, a double concerto for viola, cello and chamber orchestra was written by Lazar Đorđević (b. 1992) as the final work for his DMus degree, and premiered on 2 February 2022 in Belgrade. Pandora draws many parallels with the works by Đorđević’s supervisor, Zoran Erić (b. 1950), one of the most prominent Serbian postmodern composers; yet, Đorđević’s own “postmodernism” is very different from that of his predecessors. Pandora thus provides an opportunity to rethink various tendencies and trends among the Serbian composers of the second half of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century, which have left an imprint on the youngest generation, including the several interchanging “cycles” (or circles) of avant-garde and postmodernism. Has Pandora, with its sonic qualities and experimental drive, escaped the trends or actually reinforced them?

Legal Aliens: Serbian Composers in Western Europe Today

This article is an extract from my ongoing investigation of the destinies of Serbian composers who have emigrated since the early 1990s, a period that was marked by the dissolution of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and the ensuing wars when hundreds of thousands of professionals left the country and settled all over the world. Such a massive ‘brain drain’ has had a devastating impact on many professional realms in the entire former-Yugoslav region. Thus far, I have located more than seventy Serbian composers who currently live and work abroad, a significant number for such a small country. In this article, I focus on the professional and personal trajectories of several composers who have managed to establish successful careers in various Western European countries. A recent monograph by Elena Dubinets, Russian Composers Abroad: How They Left, Stayed, Returned (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2021), serves as my discoursive ‘counterpoint’.

Globalisation and Musical Identity: The Reception of Serbian Émigré Composers in the United States

Following the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s and the subsequent international economic sanctions imposed against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia that lasted until the early 2000s, a substantial number of Serbian composers emigrated to the United States. While this mass exodus of composers and academics had a devastating effect on Serbian cultural life, such a shift, enabled by globalisation and commodification of music, created an interest in Serbian music and culture with American audiences. That is, Serbian émigré composers who fled Yugoslavia during the war conflict conveyed their Serbian identity musically by incorporating certain folk elements. This article examines the unique ways in which select Serbian composers––Aleksandra Vrebalov, Milica Paranosic, and Natasha Bogojevich––integrated their Serbian/Yugoslav background within American multicultural society. More specifically, the article examines the effect of the infusion of Serbian motives in the works of these composers from the perspective of globalisation and commodification in the formation of their émigré Serbian musical identity.

Serbian Musical Identity in Sacred Music from Stevan Mokranjac to Marko Tajčević

Orthodox church music is as much a part of the quest for Serbian identity as art music. This article seeks to discuss the establishment of this quest in the period between the activity of the first melographers (notably Kornelije Stanković and Stevan Mokranjac) and composers working in the period leading up to the Second World War. Particular attention is paid to the parallels between the gradually developing aims of these composers, built on the collections of chants made (and harmonized) by the melographers, and the movement in architecture known as Serbo-Byzantinism. It examines the technical developments espoused by Serbian composers who went to study in Western countries and endeavoured to find a meeting point between their newly acquired knowledge and their desire to maintain links with, if not necessarily Byzantine culture, then Byzantinism as filtered through Serbian traditions of sacred music.

Building a Personal Artistic Identity as a Tribute to One’s ‘Heroes’: Vlastimir Trajković’s ‘Le Tombeau de la Bonne Musique’

In this article, I analyse the creative opus by the Serbian composer and academician Vlastimir Trajković (1947–2017) through the lens of his ‘tributes’ to several of his favourite composers and musicologists, including Maurice Ravel, Claude Debussy, Olivier Messiaen, and Manuel de Falla. However, Trajković also made a conscious effort to include at least two Serbian musical figures in this ‘Pantheon’ of greats: his own grandfather, Miloje Milojević (1884–1946), whose modernist and decidedly ‘antiromantic’ style, strongly influenced by impressionism, had a profound impact on Trajković’s own stylistic choices, and Dragutin Gostuški (1923–1998), whose seminal book Vreme umetnosti [The Time of Art] influenced Trajković’s entire poetics. I argue that Trajković built his own artistic identity with the ultimate goal of honouring his ‘heroes’, while also aiming to broaden the affirmation and acknowledgment of Serbian art music, recognising it as a constitutive element of European musical legacy.

Byzantium as a Metaphor for Identity in Serbian Music

The archaicizing ‘Byzantine thread’ in Serbian art music since the 1950s has proven to be an important one, although it has not been represented by a large number of works. Composers of such works aimed at creating a spiritually-infused atmosphere emanating from evocations of medieval times, and they achieved this goal by employing various modernist techniques. Those composers regarded the culture of Byzantium not only as a metaphor for spirituality and the inscrutable past but also used it as a means of self-identification, not least because Byzantine identity was of broader scope than national identity. Most of the Serbian composers who belonged to that thread, even if only with a handful of works, used melodic fragments either from medieval Serbian and Byzantine church chant or from Serbian present-day chant with roots in the Byzantine tradition, but which were subject to change after the fall of Byzantium. In this article, the ‘Byzantine thread’ in Serbian art music is socially and culturally contextualised.

SERBIAN CHURCH MUSIC IN BANAT - HISTORICAL ASPECTS

Serbian church music includes, in addition to the church compositions of Serbian composers, the folk song of the church. The song of the Serbian church represents, according to its characteristics, acquired during the historical development, an original work, created with the help of the influence of the church and the people. How fast the Serbian church folk song developed towards independence, from the adoption of Christianity until the middle of the 13th century and how much it could separate from its model in that short time, cannot be determined, because there are no data. about that and there are no records. In the Serbian autocephalous archdiocese (since 1219) and later the Patriarchate of Peci (since 1346), the care of Serbian church leaders, which is reflected in numerous donations, has created favorable opportunities for the full expansion of church life. With the transfer of the people and national and church leaders to the Habsburg Empire, many of them in the region of Banat, the singing of the church, in the more favorable circumstances of the civilized state, developed freely, but increasingly independent of the distant model. Church authorities have taken steps to preserve, renew and develop the song. With the founding of the seminary in Sremski Karlovci in 1794 and the appointment of the first teacher of church singing in 1797, an important center was created for maintaining a certain unity in church singing. The most difficult and important, however, is the problem of the structure and essence of Serbian folk church singing.

The Beginning of Modernism in the Music of Serbian Composers

"Significantly penetrating the years between the two world wars, this situation testifies to the long process of uneven development of Serbian music. Despite the founding of the Belgrade Opera (1920), the gradual growth of performing qualities, the expansion of the repertoire, the premiere of the first Serbian musical and dramatic achievements of modern expression, the influence of popular music remains an almost exclusive privilege of traditional national forms of music. In order to establish internal continuity, they modernized and expanded the existing tradition with new genres, appreciating that sudden new leaps in language can be accepted primarily in those genres that have already gained some continuity in national music. Keywords: modernism, serbian, tradition, nationalism, genres. "

Musical styles approached by Serbian composers in the first half of the 20th century

The musical creation of Serbian composers is not well known in the European area, primarily due to censorship in the first half of the 20th century when music influenced by European orientations was considered capitalist and was banned on the one hand, and on the other hand due to the fact that most of the works are written in Cyrillic and thus did not reach the European research circuit. It should be mentioned that the course of development of music history in Europe, with its periodization into stages of Baroque, Classicism, Romanticism, Impressionism, Expressionism, Neoclassicism, Avant-garde, and Postmodernism, was not applied to music in Serbia. However, all these styles will be found in the musical creations of Serbian composers in the period from the end of the 19th century and during the 20th century.

The Role of the Third Program of Radio Belgrade in the Presentation, Promotion, and Expansion of Serbian Avant-Garde Music in the 1960s and 1970s

This article details the various activities at the Third Program of Radio Belgrade that contributed to the presentation, promotion, and expansion of ‘new music’ in Serbia (then a constituent republic of the SFR Yugoslavia) during the 1960s and 1970s. These activities ranged from the foundation of the first professional Electronic Studio in Serbia in 1972 to the organisation of concerts by soloists and ensembles, mostly from abroad, specialising in performing the most advanced contemporary music at the time. Moreover, the music broadcast on the Third Program inspired the most adventurous Serbian composers to embark on mastering the newest compositional techniques and the latest technologies of that time. My aim is to discuss the numerous ways in which the Third Program contributed to the development and flourishing of the avant-garde music scene in Serbia.

Three String Quartets by Ivana Stefanović—Three Aspects of Serbian Music in the Second Half of the Twentieth Century

The three string quartets by eminent Serbian composer Ivana Stefanović (b. 1948) were composed during three distinct periods of her oeuvre: modernism, avant-garde, and postmodernism. As such, they are paradigmatic for the development of Serbian modernist and avant-garde tendencies in the second half of the twentieth century. The First Quartet (1969–70) is a student work influenced by Enriko Josif, her professor of composition who was a member of the first modernist wave that appeared in Serbian music in the 1950s. The Second Quartet, Harmonies (1976), indicates Serbian avant-garde features with arched forms and music that ‘emerges’ from silence before ‘drowning’ in it. The Third Quartet, Play Strindberg (1993), is a departure from the previous two—it is a tonal piece with a clear form, written for a theatrical play. The dramatised musical story carries with it an emphasized need for the literarisation of musical form and a typically postmodernist attitude towards styles such as romanticism and modernism.

The Polish School, Johann Sebastian Bach, and The Gospel According to St. John in an Avant-Garde Synergy: Music of Becoming (1965) by Serbian Composer Rajko Maksimović

In his orchestral composition, Musique de devenir [Music of Becoming, 1965], Serbian composer Rajko Maksimović (b. 1935) established a musical style he formed after hearing the works of Witold Lutosławski and other Polish composers at the first Music Biennale Zagreb (Yugoslavia, 1961). Maksimović believed that the novelties of the Polish school were much more interesting than (m)any of the achievements of the avant-garde Darmstadt circle or American experimental music. Thus, he structured Music of Becoming on clusters and applied aleatory principles to rhythm and pitch. As a support to this avant-garde ‘announcement’, Maksimović used selected lines from The Gospel According to St. John; just as the Gospel accounts for the genesis of the wor(l)d, Maksimović’s improvisation on Bach’s name (B–A–C–H) suggests the procreation of new music that is based on aleatoric principles and clusters.

Сербские народные песни в обработке Корнелия Станковича

The paper aims to reveal specificity of Kornelije Stanković’s adaptations of the Serbian folk songs. Scientific originality of the study lies in the fact that the researcher introduces the Serbian folk songs recorded and adopted by Kornelije Stanković in the middle of the XIX century into scientific circulation. These songs are little known in Russia. The conducted analysis allows concluding that chordal harmonic texture of Stanković’s piano versions is suitable for a four-part a cappella chorus. Homophonic-harmonic texture of piano versions is of choral nature and is chordal three-part polyphony with accompaniment. Stanković’s instrumentation most accurately represents melodic peculiarities of the Serbian songs, preserving their tonal harmonic system and introducing modality and variability of functions. Stanković’s approach to the folk song adaptation was adopted by the Serbian composers.

Voices of Identities: Vocal Music and De/con/struction of Communities in the Former Habsburg Areas ed. by Daniel Ender and Christoph Flamm

Reviewed by: Voices of Identities: Vocal Music and De/con/struction of Communities in the Former Habsburg Areas ed. by Daniel Ender and Christoph Flamm Georg Burgstaller Voices of Identities: Vocal Music and De/con/struction of Communities in the Former Habsburg Areas. Edited by Daniel Ender and Christoph Flamm. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2018. [viii, 190 p. ISBN 9781527508088 (hardcover), $99.95; ISBN 9781527525870 (e-book), price varies.] Illustrations, music examples, bibliographies, maps, screenshots. This slender volume of proceedings from a 2014 conference in Klagenfurt explores the role of vocal music (ranging from traditional song to opera) in relation to the plurality of identities (from individual to supranational identity) in the territories of the former Austrian–Hungarian Empire after 1918, with a particular focus on the Balkan peninsula and relative neglect of the empire's Italian regions and farther outreaches to the east. The editors' unforced conceptualization of identity in the context of such multi-ethnic, multinational, and multicultural complexity acts as an apposite curtain-raiser: individuality is voluntarily (though not always unproblematically) ceded to become subsumed in, as George Herbert Mead put it, the "generalized other" (p. 2). How might the voice, perhaps the most individual human expression, figure in this process of converging around or diverging from the new social models formed within the identity vacuum created by the fall of empire and beyond? Ursula Hemetek's chapter on the role of traditional song and identification in the Balkans—buried towards the end of the volume—might have been an appropriate gambit to unravel the issue, but the collection is elegantly launched, nonetheless, by Gerda Lechleitner's chapter on the Vienna Phonogrammarchiv (initiated in 1899 as a matter of scholarly interest in ethnography and linguistics rather than music) and its spoken-voice recordings, with some discussion of music from Croatian Sprachinseln (language islands) and a brief gloss on how language and music might figure as markers of identity in the case of Burgenland Croats, based on recordings from the first three decades of the twentieth century. (Marko Kölbl offers a discussion emphasizing the tension between retaining and creating musical traditions within that particular ethnic minority in a later chapter.) The essays that follow create a multifarious, somewhat eclectic path through a large variety of musical genres in geographies that could be grouped together as those of today's eastern central Europe (Czech Republic and Poland), aforementioned Croatia, Serbia, and Hungary, as well as a couple of essays on music in Austria, all largely by writers hailing from the countries in question. Bohemia is discussed by way of David Vondráček's essay on the music for jazz revues at Prague's avant-garde theater Osvobozené Divadlo (Liberated Theater; 1926–38), which had become reimagined as a specifically Czech sound of resistance against both Nazism and communism. In a similar vein, Anna G. Piotrowska offers insights into the selfportrayal and stereotyping of urban minorities (in this case Romani people) in Cracow's vaudeville theater during the early twentieth century as well. Three consecutive chapters are devoted to Serbian music: Melita Milin provides an overview of identity issues affecting composers in interwar Yugoslavia, especially their oscillation between actively promoted supranational (Yugoslav) identity on the one hand and national (Serbian) identity on the other. These became musically reified by adherence to a distinct musical culture established in Serbia (1882–1918) as opposed to an embrace of more [End Page 100] progressive tendencies—especially expressionism—in Slovenia and Croatia, even if these were nowhere near akin to Viennese modernism. A historically broadly conceived excursion into the orally transmitted Serbian folk epic, illuminating its eventual nationalist potential during the twentieth century, is followed by Nadežda Mosusova's discussion of the premiere of the opera Ženidba Miloša Obilića (The Marriage of Miloš Obilić) by Serbian composer Petar Konjović (1883–1970) at the Croatian National Theatre in Zagreb in 1917. A pseudohistorical drama partly based on the Serbian Kosovo epic about the fourteenthcentury knight Miloš Obilić, the opera's perceived Serbian patriotism proved politically sensitive given the hostilities between Austria-Hungary and Serbia before and during World War I, as can be gleaned from its reception in the Croatian...