Serbian Music: Yugoslav Contexts

Serbian Music: Yugoslav Contexts SERBIAN MUSIC: YUGOSLAV CONTEXTS Edited by Melita Milin and Jim Samson Published by Institute of Musicology SASA Technical editor Goran Janjić Cover design Aleksandra Dolović Number of copies 300 Printed by Colorgrafx ISBN 978-86-80639-19-2 SERBIAN MUSIC: YUGOSLAV CONTEXTS EDITED BY MELITA MILIN JIM SAMSON INSTITUTE OF MUSICOLOGY OF THE SERBIAN ACADEMY OF SCIENCES AND ARTS BELGRADE 2014 This book has been published thanks to the financial support of the Ministry of education, science and technological development of the Republic of Serbia. Cover illustration: Vera Božičković Popović, Abstract Landscape, 1966. Courtesy of Zepter Museum, Belgrade. CONTENTS PREFACE............................................................................................................7 Melita Milin INTRODUCTION.............................................................................................9 Jim Samson 1. SERBIAN MUSIC IN WESTERN HISTORIOGRAPHY......................17 Katy Romanou 2. WRITING NATIONAL HISTORIES IN A MULTINATIONAL STATE..........................................................................................................29 Melita Milin 3. DISCIPLINING THE NATION: MUSIC IN SERBIA UNTIL 1914 ................................................................................................47 Biljana Milanović 4. IMAGINING THE HOMELAND: THE SHIFTING BORDERS OF PETAR KONJOVIĆ’S YUGOSLAVISMS........................................73 Katarina Tomašević 5. THE INTER-WAR CORRESPONDENCE BETWEEN MILOJE MILOJEVIĆ AND SLAVKO OSTERC ...................................95 Jernej Weiss 6. BYZANTINE DISCOURSES IN CONTEMPORARY SERBIAN MUSIC.................................................................................... 109 Ivan Moody 7. ‘A WINDOW TOWARDS THE WEST’: YUGOSLAV CONCERT TOURS IN THE SOVIET UNION .......... 127 Ana Petrov 8. MUSIC OF THE LOST GENERATION: SERBIAN ÉMIGRÉ COMPOSERS....................................................... 143 Ivana Medić 5 9. FLOATING IMAGES OF YUGOSLAVISM ON THE PAGES OF FAMILY MUSIC ALBUMS............................................................. 165 Srđan Atanasovski NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS .................................................................. 187 INDEX............................................................................................................ 193 Note Chapters 2, 3, 4, 8 and 9 were written as part of the project Serbian Musical Identities within Local and Global Frameworks: Traditions, Changes, Chal- lenges (no. 177004) funded by the Ministry of Education and Science of Re- public of Serbia. 6 PREFACE Melita Milin 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 Con- gress 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 substan- tially revised; Atanasovski has provided an article on a new topic in ac- cordance 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 as- pects 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 im- portance 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 estab- lishment of that complex state? How did the competing political pro- grammes of the different nations influence the sphere of music? How was the official cultural policy of rapprochement among the different Yugo- slav 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-repre- sentation 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. 7 SERBIAN MUSIC: YUGOSLAV CONTEXTS In addition to the six chapters on the construction of Serbian cultural identity within Yugoslavia by Serbian scholars (‘insiders’), there are ‘out- sider’ 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 Por- tugal 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 disconti- nuities in a country that has always viewed itself as part of European cultural space. 8 INTRODUCTION Jim Samson In Chapter 1 of this volume, Katy Romanou refers to the emergence of a global music historiography in recent years, citing several exemplary writings and projects. The message is that the age of national histories of music (initiated in Germany in the nineteenth century), like the similarly motivated, all-powerful and all-pervasive folklore movement, is finally on the wane. Yet neither will recede quickly or gracefully. Witness the con- tinuing folklore projects – scholarly and performative – around the edges of Europe today. And witness too the institutionalized pedagogies that still place the nation at the heart of cultural histories. ‘Nationalism and the properties that created it are disintegrating’, are Romanou’s words. Well, it will be a lengthy process. My own contribution to the symposium of which this book is a par- tial record was well attuned to Romanou’s argument. It was a polemical call for a denationalization of music histories, referring not just to Serbia but to the wider meta-region of southeastern Europe. I cited there the pioneering multi-volume literary history edited by Cornis-Pope and Neubauer as a possible exemplary model for musicology,1 and I went on to propose a historiography of this region that recognized the common- alities stemming from shared cultural substrata, from common imperial legacies (both Habsburg and Ottoman), and, more recently, from the lure of modern Europe. I suggested too that even the so-called national schools of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were not ex- empt, in the sense that each nation displayed in practice a variant of a single bourgeois culture, while at the same time competitively elevating, asserting and promoting its uniqueness. In other words, there was a divorce between practice and discourse. For long enough commentaries on cultural nationalism, whether by historical musicologists or ethnomusicologists, have recognized this divorce. If I were to cite just two seminal, influential texts along these lines, 1 M. Cornis-Pope and J. Neubauer (eds.), History of the Literary Cultures of East- Central Europe: Junctures and Disjunctures in the 19th and 20th Centuries. 4 vols. (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2004). 9 SERBIAN MUSIC: YUGOSLAV CONTEXTS I would opt for an essay on nationalism and music by Carl Dahlhaus and a book on the music of European nationalism by Philip Bohlman.2 Historical musicologists today, even when working within the boundaries of national projects, are alive in the main to Dahlhaus’s central insight: that nationalism is by no means a material category of music history, but rather a receptional category, albeit one that had material consequences (on those consequences, note that Dahlhaus’s larger agenda was to dem- onstrate that, pace Marxist historians, ideas can change history). Likewise, even those ethnomusicologists actively involved in folklore movements today are usually careful to acknowledge, with Bohlman, that the folklore movement was ideologically freighted right from the start, differentiating ‘folk music’ (the scare quotes are now inescapable) from traditional music. Yet the full implications of this divorce for the writing of music histories have not always been fully drawn. For long enough the discourses of music history were frankly chauvinistic. There were lands ‘without music’, after all, as Oskar Adolf Hermann Schmitz announced to the world in 1904, and note that his book ran to no fewer than eight editions.3

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