‘Between East and West’: Socialist Modernism as the Official Paradigm of Serbian Art Music in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia

Year 2017, Volume: 1 Issue: 1, 141 - 163, 30.12.2017

Jelena Jankovıć-beguš

https://doi.org/10.33906/musicologist.373187

Cited By: 2

Abstract

In this paper I discuss the notion of
‘socialist modernism’ and argue for its introduction into Serbian music history
and musicology as an appropriate label for a vast number of works composed in
the seventh and eighth decades of the 20^th Century. The term is borrowed from
Serbian art theory, where it was introduced by Ješa Denegri, who defined
‘socialist modernism’ as a further development of the notion of ‘socialist
aestheticism’, which was the first sign of distancing from the ‘socialist
realism’ as the dominant aesthetic position in the years immediately after the
end of the WWII. While both terms have been widely used to discuss the visual
arts and architecture (e. g. Miško Šuvaković), they have not been applied to
the study of Serbian and Yugoslav music history. It is my goal to analyse the
main facets of ‘socialist modernism’ and to compare this notion to other
prominent terms, which are commonly used to describe the art music production
of the majority of Serbian composers in the given period, notably to ‘moderated
modernism’ and ‘neoclassicism.’

Denegri used the notion of ‘socialist
modernism’ to point to the specific position of the Socialist Federal Republic
of Yugoslavia ‘between East and West’ during the Cold War. He defined it as a
“unique formation that emerged at the crossroads of the features of Eastern and
Western cultural models.” Similar tendencies can also be observed in Serbian
art music since the late 1950s, with an increasing desire to ‘catch up’ with
the dominant currents of European musical (high) modernism.

As a paradigmatic example of this stylistic
approach in art music of the 1960s and 1970s, I discuss the poetics of
Aleksandar Obradović (1927–2001), one of the most prominent Yugoslav (Serbian)
composers of the period, whose artistic profile vividly illustrates the
currents of political developments and changes in Yugoslav art in the second
half of the 20^th Century.

Keywords

Socialist modernism, SFRY, Neoclassicism, Moderated modernism, Serbian musicology, Ješa Denegri, Miško Šuvaković, Aleksandar Obradović

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