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This article is based on the correspondence between two important European musicologists of the second quarter of the 20th century, Jacques Handschin and Higini Anglès. I analyse the political problems discussed in these letters as well as the influence of the political beliefs of the both scientists on their scientific concepts.
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This study explores the collaboration between the soprano Maja Strozzi-Pečić and the composer Petar Konjović. It sheds light on the relations between the star and the musical work, as well as the notions of gender and genre, reinstating the performer to the centre of the historical stage within the epoch and the genre of music not usually associated with stardom. It examines the star as both the product and the producer, and as an embodiment of a national identity, highlighting the star’s agency in the creation of her own persona and the co-authoring of the works that she performed.
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Miodrag A. Vasiljević (1903-1963) was given a unique opportunity to span two great developmental stages in the history of Serbian ethnomusicology, occurring in the middle of the 20th century. The first of them was between the two World Wars, the stage in which Serbian musical folklore became Vasiljević’s life passion and in which he accomplished his early professional achievements. In the next stage, which started after World War II, he reached the zenith of his creation in slightly less than twenty years, setting new standards of the discipline, and providing fundamental directions for his successors, thereby immeasurably enlarging the corpus of collected material. Due all of these revolutionary innovations from the post-war period, Vasiljević is rightly considered to be not only the founder of modern Serbian ethnomusicology, but also the first person in Serbia worthy of being called an ethnomusicologist in the full sense of the word. Of the numerous results by which Vasiljević permanently indebted his people, the most pronounced does not belong to the category of pioneering endeavours, but is manifested in his melographic opus – an achievement which even today has not been surpassed in Serbia in terms of its span, scope and value. Such great productivity in recording resulted from the fact that Vasiljević had been devoted to melography from his childhood, and most intensely from 1932 to the end of his life. The exact number of examples which Vasiljević transcribed directly in the field before 1951 and those which he recorded on a tape-recorder after that time is still unknown, since many of them are still unavailable to the public, but it can be assumed that there are several thousand melodies in total. Among them are 3,198 which have already been published. That precious corpus of Vasiljević’s available material is contained in twelve collections (the largest number ever regarding any collector in Serbia so far), issued from 1950 to 2009. The first four collections offer comprehensive material from Kosmet, Sandžak, Macedonia and the region of Leskovac, and they were edited by Vasiljević himself during the last ten years of his life or so. Posthumous publications were devoted to Montenegro, Vojvodina, Resava and various parts of central Serbia, as well as to the repertoires of the famous singer Hamdija Šahinpašić (1914/16-2003) from Sandžak, and gypsy female singer Malika Jeminović Koštana (1872?–1945) from the vicinity of Vranje. Until now there have still not been any comprehensive studies on Vasiljević’s ethnomusicological activity, although there are valuable articles. In these, Vasiljević’s melographic contribution is usually emphasised much more than his scientific one, which is much more modest in its scope. Since the existing writings mostly deal with collections published during his life, this paper results from the intention to give a complete picture of the material, so all Vasiljević’s collections were critically considered according to the chronology of their publication. Each of the publications emerged to witness to both Vasiljević as a field worker and to some of the important stages of his own ethnomusicological development.
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Music has the power of establishing a sense of personal closeness and of confirming the existence of a meaningful reality. This is because it creates, or imitates a face-toface situation in which participants experience the same events during shared time. Face-to-face interaction is the primary means by which humans are able to conduct a “reality check” in the face of chaos, sense of meaninglessness and unreality. However, this interaction is basically “about nothing”; in this sense, it is an instance of “pure sociality”. Musical phenomena are semiotic in nature only insofar as they do not stand for themselves, but for something else. When describing social facts and social practices, we are heavily dependent on words and concepts. At the same time, the arts do, by definition, endeavour to bring about experiences that are untranslatable to any other form of expression. Arts sociologists’ answer to this dilemma has most often been to turn away from the arts themselves and to concentrate instead on the social fields and activities that surround them. This essay suggests a perspective of music as interaction creating an intersubjectively shared experience. At the same time, it is admitted that music, similarly to any other kind of interaction, can also fail in this, or be used deliberately for exclusion. This essay invites discussion on possible uses of this perspective in sociological and cultural research.
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Review of: Богослужбени и уметнички елементи у српској црквеној хорској музици у периоду између два светска рата (1918–1941). Нови Сад: Универзитет у Новом Саду, Академија уметности – Матица српска (2015).
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Review of: „Врбице, врбо зелена” – традиционално музичко наслеђе Призренске горе. Компакт диск са пропратном књижицом, Београд: Етнолошко-антрополошко друштво Србије, 2013.
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Globalisation of musicology and music history aims to fuse the divisions created during Western music’s acme, and is referred to as “post-European historical thinking”. Therefore, “post” and “pre” European historical thinking have much in common. One aspect of this process of fragmentation was that music history was separated from theory and that Western Music Histories succeeded General Music Histories (a development described in some detail in the article). Connecting global music history with “post-European” historical thinking is one among numerous indications of Western awareness that European culture has reached some sort of a terminal phase. Concurrently, countries that have been developing by following Western Europe as a prototype, are leading today some past phase of Western development, which, with the ideas of cultural relativism prevailing, are not considered inferior.
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The opus of contemporary Serbian composer Milorad Marinković (b. 1976), which encompasses works of choral, chamber, concertante and symphony music, leans towards classical forms of artistic music, Serbian folklore music, and Serbian Orthodox church chant. This paper deals with pieces composed for larger instrumental ensembles: Herojska uvertira (Heroic Overture) for symphony orchestra, Psalmodija (Psalmody) for symphony orchestra, Koncert za klavir i orkestar (Piano concerto) and Mala opera (Little Opera) for chamber ensemble (septet) with prominent soloist parts of flute and clarinet. Special attention is placed on different procedures used by Marinković to accomplish wholeness and integration of the musical tissue. This paper observes these pieces as examples of religious music, having in mind the composer’s own understanding of the notion. Among common characteristics of the observed works that justify this point of view are specific single movement forms and the prominent role of main thematic materials, a cyclic principle, and programmatic elements. References to Serbian church chant observed in Marinković’s instrumental works are also discussed, especially in parallel with the analogue procedures used by Ljubica Marić (1909– 2003), one of the composer’s role models. Although Marinković’s works for instrumental ensembles do not fall into the category of spiritual music in its narrow sense (as defined by the composer himself), in this paper they are nevertheless considered as “spiritual” in a broader sense, as an expression of the composer’s desire to spiritualize his entire artistic output.
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Instrumental performance, leadership, and authorship by women in music has historically been subjected to various repressive regimes, while many of the prejudices and restrictions regarding female musicking can still be discerned in contemporary popular music practices in Serbia. These mechanisms have been transferred into contemporary music with different ideological and stylistic inclination, such as indie music cohorts and folk- or tradition-based genres and scenes. The structural preconditions that articulate the subject position of female instrumentalists, regardless of genre or the scene they belong to are the lack of history of female playing and the requirement that they reach the supposedly higher standards of male musicians. This article starts with a brief genealogy of female instrumental music performance from late socialism to the diversity of contemporary popular music in its present neo-liberal context. Against that background it interprets the disciplining mechanisms restricting female musical creativity and performance, addressing the issues of identity and power through female agency in music.
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Review of: Stevan Stojanović Mokranjac (1856–1914). The Belgrade Choral Society: Foreign Concert Tours. Belgrade: Institute of Musicology of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts and Serbian Musicological Society, 2014; Editor Biljana Milanović.
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Review of: Gordan M. Dragović, Inscenacija Opere. Beograd: CICERO, ATF, 2015.
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The affective turn, which has already questioned dominant paradigms in many disciplinary fields including cultural studies, philosophy, political theory, anthropology, psychology and neuroscience, has started to attract more attention in the field of ethnomusicology, becoming a particularly vibrant stream of thought. Drawing on the voices that call for the historicisation of and critical deliberation on the field of affect studies, the article strives to show how theories of affect might expand dominant paradigms in ethnomusicology and also points to their limitations.
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In this paper I explore the challenges of the “affective turn” and map new avenues of music research in this direction. I discuss four paths of enquiry, in deviation from the semiotic models: the discovery of the non-signified materiality and its potentiality to generate affects, the potentiality of affect to de-signify, the ability of sign machines to catalyse the production of intensities and, finally, the power of social machines to overcode the produced affect through non-discursive mechanisms. I argue that the affective turn in musicology can provide a different structuring of a view from without and a view from within, calling both for finely tuned “close reading” and for the ability of the researcher to grasp the performative context.
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The article discusses a new model of the origins of choral singing in the context of human evolutionary history. Hominid interaction with predators is seen as a crucial force in the evolution of human morphology and behaviour. Group singing and dancing, with body painting and the use of masks, are perceived as critical elements of the strategy to deter predators and to put hominids into an altered state of consciousness. In this state, humans do not feel fear and pain and are ready to sacrifice their lives for the common goal. This psychological condition is still important to many human group activities, particularly in religion and the military. The mosaic distribution of polyphonic traditions is discussed in the context of the origins of language and articulated speech.
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In this paper I deal with the ways in which the audience functions as a means of producing collectivities. I define audience as a material body that is a carrier of affective potential in a certain time and space. Taking Yugoslav popular music as an example, i.e. the concerts of performers from the territory of former Yugoslavia, I analyse two crucial issues: the audience at popular music concerts in Belgrade in the period after the dissolution of Yugoslavia, and the audience that is created virtually through social networks.
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This paper brings together several theoretical issues relevant both to the fields of musicology/ethnomusicology and feminist/gender studies – above all, the issue of the status of the voice within the complexity of a body-textuality tension, and the issue of mapping the strategies of feminine writing in the contemporary vocal performance. Through the analysis of chosen case studies it highlights the possibility of making an alteration, transformation and re-signification of a firm structural linguistic/social order in the field of sound, thus creating a space for a feminine body to be heard.
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Speech choirs emerged as an offshoot of the choral gatherings of a wider youth musical and singing movement in the first half of the 20th century. The occasionally expressed opinion that choral speaking was cultivated primarily by the Hitler Youth and pressed into service on behalf of Nazi nationalist and racist propaganda is, historically, only partially accurate. The primary forces of choral speaking in Germany were, from 1919, the Social Democratic workers’ and cultural movement and the Catholic youth groups, in addition to elementary and secondary schools. The popularity of speech choirs around 1930 was also echoed in the music of the time. Compositions for musical speech choirs were produced by composers like Heinz Thiessen, Arnold Schönberg, Ernst Toch, Carl Orff, Vladimir Vogel, Luigi Nono, Helmut Lachenmann and Wolfgang Rihm. Moving forward from the Schönberg School, the post-1945 new music thereby opens up the spectrum of vocal expressions of sound beyond that of the singing voice. It does so not only for solo voices but for the choir as well.
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Review of: Надежда Мосусова - Cрпски музички театар. Историјски фрагменти. Београд: Музиколошки институт САНУ, 2013.
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Review of: Драгана Стојановић-Новичић: Винко Глобокар: Mузичка Oдисеја једног емигранта. Београд: Факултет музичке уметности, Катедра за музикологију, едиција „Музиколошке студије – монографије”, свеска 18, 2013.
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The Fourth Symposium of the ICTM Study Group on Music and Dance in Southeastern Europe was held between September 24th and October 1st 2014 at the Faculty of Music, University of Arts in Belgrade and the Petnica Science Center near Valjevo, Serbia. It was the first time that the ICTM Symposium had been organised in Serbia. It was dedicated to the work of sisters Ljubica and Danica Janković – pioneers in dance, as well as in ethnomusicological and ethnological research in Serbia – which also corresponds thematically to the subjects and aims of this particular ICTM Study Group. The Janković sisters prepared a total of eight volumes of the edition Folk dances (Narodne igre) from 1934 to 1964, and 2014 was the year of their multiple anniversaries.1 In line with this, part of the Legacy of Ljubica and Danica Janković, stored in the National Library of Serbia, was presented to the participants of the Symposium
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