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VOL.8 2013 MUSIC AND SOCIETY IN EASTERN EUROPE MUSIC AND SOCIETY IN EASTERN EUROPE EDITOR Jelena Milojkovic-Djuric 1018 Holt, College Station, TX 77840 E-mail: [email protected] BOOK REVIEW EDITOR Larson Powell, University of Missouri at Kansas City DISCOGRAPHY EDITOR Charles Schlacks, Idyllwild, California EDITORIAL BOARD Elliott Antokoletz - University of Texas, Austin Michael Beckerman - New York University Olga Muller Cooke - Texas A & M University Melita Milin - Musicological Institute, Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Belgrade, Serbia William Smialek - Jarvis Christian College, Hawkins, Texas Jiri Vyslouzil - Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic MUSIC AND SOCIETY IN EASTERN EUROPE is published annually. Subscription rates are: Institutions - $30.00; Individuals - $20.00. Postage rates for USA - $3.00; for Canada - $8.00; for foreign - $13.00. Send pay- ment to: Charles Schlacks, Jr., Publisher, P.O. Box 1256, Idyllwild, CA 92549-1256, USA. Contributions for possible publication should be sent to the editor. Technical format should adhere to the Chicago Manual of Style, 15* Edition and be suitable for Microsoft Windows XP and Word 2003. Copyright © 2013 Charles Schlacks, Publisher All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America ISSN: 1930-6288 The publisher wishes to express his thanks to Mrs. Antal Dorati for permission to publish a picture of her late husband. Mixed media illustration by Marcia Gawecki. www.marciagaweckiart.com Vol. 8 2013 Music and Society in Eastern Europe Table of Contents From the Editor \\\ . vii ARTICLES In the Orbit of Shostakovich: VasiUje Mokranjac 's Symphonies 1 Ivana Medic The Music Critic as Humanist; GyorgyKrod (1926-1997) and the Music of His Time 23 Peter Laki Forms of Oppression and Resistance in European Music: The Twentieth Century 37 Mirjana Veselinovic-Hofman On Comparative Research in Musicology: Peripheral vs. Central European Musical Culture and the Musicological Comparative Approach in the Twentieth Century 55 Valentina Radoman Vain Art of the Fugue by Dumitru Tsepeneag - A Case of Musicalized Fiction 1 \a Dragu Musical Life in Yugoslavia between the World Wars 85 Jelena Milokovic-Djuric Music and Society in Eastern Europe, 8 (2013), 1-21. ARTICLES IVANA MEDIC IN THE ORBIT OF SHOSTAKOVICH: VASILIJE MOKRANJAC'S SYMPHONIES^ Born into a famous Serbian musical dynasty,2 Vasilije Mokranjac (1923- 1984) emerged as a distinctive talent on his own and became one of the most renowned Serbian/Yugoslav composers of the second half of the twentieth century, a distinguished professor of composition at the Faculty of Music in Belgrade and a Fellow of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts. Mainly lauded as a symphonist, he also wrote piano music, as well as music for radio, film and theatre. He won the most prestigious awards in the former Yugoslavia, including the Lifetime Achievement Award. However, his output is virtually unknown outside the former Yugo- slav region. An introverted man, who was not keen on self-promotion, Mokranjac did not seek international recognition and rarefy ventured out of the country. Moreover, his career was tragically cut short when, aged 60, he committed suicide. In this article I will argue that the symphonies of Dmitrii Shostakovich (1907-1975) provided a possible model for Mokranjac's symphonic con- ception. Arguably the greatest twentieth-century symphonist, Shostakovich proved that it was possible to successfully merge "realist" iconology with the nineteenth-century symphonic models and yet create compelling and relevant music. But while it is widely recognised that Shostakovich influ- enced generations of Soviet/Russian composers, the impact of his sym- phonies outside of the Soviet Union - especially in the countries such as Yugoslavia that did not belong to the Eastern Bloc and thus stood outside of the immediate Soviet cultural sphere - has rarely been investigated. Although my decision to compare Mokranjac to Shostakovich in the first ever English-language study of Mokranjac's symphonies might seem 1. This article was written as part of the project Serbian musical identities within local and global frameworks: traditions, changes, challenges, funded by the Serbian Ministry of Culture (No. 177004(2011-2014)). I am grateful to the Editor of this journal and the anonymous reviewers for their constructive suggestions in preparing this article. 2, Three generations of the Mokranjac family were musicians; one of his ancestors was Stevan Stojanovic Mokranjac (1856-1914), the prominent Serbian composer from the late nineteenth-early twentieth century. 2 Music and Society in Eastern Europe problematic in that it poses a risk of him being seen as just one of Shostakovich's countless epigones, it is a convenient way of introducing Mokranjac to a vast majority of readers who are not familiar with his oeu- vre.3 While it is impossible to prove that Mokranjac was directly influ- enced by Shostakovich, due to the lack of written and oral testimonies, I aim to demonstrate that there are numerous similarities in their approaches to the challenge of writing a "great" symphony in the twentieth century. The fact that Mokranjac lived and worked in a country that had effectively been an Ottoman colony for several centuries and only started to establish its cultural institutions and professional musical life in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries meant that there was no local symphonic tradition to build upon; hence, the composers had to look for role models elsewhere. Just like Shostakovich, Mokranjac is essentially an heir to the late Ro- mantic symphonies; the protagonist of his symphonies is always an indi- vidual (possibly the artist himself) struggling against the oppressive and menacing outer world. I will show to what extent Mokranjac's symphonies relied upon Shostakovichian paradigm, but also point to the areas where they departed from his model. While analysing Shostakovich's possible in- fluence on Mokranjac's symphonies, I will situate Mokranjac's output within the Serbian post-World War Two musical scene, analyze specific • traits of his symphonic style and attempt to decode his musical symbolism in order to answer a tricky (and tacky) question: did the composer some- how announce his suicide in his music? From Socialist Realism to Moderated Modernism The end of the World War Two found Serbia (and the entire former Yugoslavia) impoverished and demolished. The late 1940s saw the emer- gence of the first generation of composers trained at the Belgrade Music Academy (nowadays Faculty of Music), which had only been founded in 1937. However, their point of departure was not the avant-garde output of Serbian composers educated in Prague in the late 1920s and early 1930s, mostly in the class of Alois Haba. Upon their return to Belgrade in the late 1930s, the members of this so-called "Prague Group" realised that the time was not yet ripe for Serbian avant-garde music, for two reasons; the first being the fact that the most advanced contemporary music was not well- received by the audiences, and that the critics, composers and performers 3. In Serbia, Mokranjac's symphonies have been discussed in a book and a series of articles, but the issue of Shostakovich's possible influence has never been raised. See: Marija KovaC, Simfonijska muzika Vasilija Mokranjca [The Symphonies of Vasilije Mokranjac] (Belgrade: Association of Serbian Composers, 1984); Vlastimir PeriCic, "Druga simfonija Vasilija Mokranjca" [Second Symphony], Zvuk, no. 69 (1966); DuSan Skovran, "Treca simfonija Vasilija Mokranjca" [Third Symphony], Pro musica, no. 37 (1968): 10-11; Vlastimir PeriCit, "Cetvrta simfonija Vasilija Mokranjca" [Fourth Symphony], Pro musica, no. 65 (1973): 16-19; etc. In the Orbit of Shostakovich; Vasilije Mokranjac's Symphonies worldwide were aware of the "crisis".4 Many composers who initially ad- vocated for an equation of radical avant-garde music with the radical po- litical left changed their orientation towards more accessible styles, even before the outbreak of World War Two.5 A member of the "Prague Group", Stanojlo Rajidic (1910-2000) recalled that, upon their return to Serbia, he and his peers realised that "to continue using contemporary musical lan- guage meant that one's music would not be performed and would not be understood." The second reason was the underdevelopment of Serbian musical life and its institutions in general. As observed by Melita Milin, "The negation of tradition, which is one of [avant-garde's] main positions, [...] was too radical for a young musical culture which had been trying to establish its own tradition during the last century with a lot of enthusiasm and effort."7 After the war had ended and the Communist Party seized power, the doctrine of Socialist Realism became - albeit only for a brief period of time - the official cultural norm in the newly established Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia (later Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia). Although Yugoslav artists escaped the harsh denunciations that their peers in the countries of the Eastern Bloc were subjected to, the composers were still expected to write accessible, tona! music, loosely based upon "na- tional" musical premises. The professional upbringing of Vasilije Mokran- jac and his fellow students, who begun their studies in the immediate post- war years, was influenced by a mixture of social and political circum- stances, academic rules and canons. As acknowledged by Mokranjac's classmate Vlastimir PeriCic (1927-2000), in the immediate