Ivana Medic

Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts · Department of Fine Arts and Music

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...

Nove izdaje Zgodovine glasbe na Slovenskem predstavljajo mogočen dosežek slovenskih muzikologov več generacij. Ti so nove edicije marljivo ustvarjali več kot desetletje. Prva knjiga, ki jo je uredil Jurij Snoj in zajema obdobje pred koncem šestnajstega stoletja, torej do »nedvoumne preusmeritve slovenskih dežel h katoliškemu jugu« (str. xi), je izš...

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 i...

In this article I present a “manifesto” of the new discipline of applied musicology, which is closely related to the project Applied Musicology and Ethnomusicology in Serbia: Making a Difference in Contemporary Society (APPMES), supported by the Serbian Science Fund. Here I wish to outline some of the main aims and goals of this project and offer a...

https://www.cambridgescholars.com/product/978-1-5275-7313-0 This volume is the first collection of essays in English devoted to the work of the outstanding Yugoslavian composer Rudolf Bruči. It approaches Bruči’s work from a remarkably broad number of angles, and the chapters underline that fact that his work was multivalent. The book emphasizes h...

This collection of essays is dedicated to Alexander Ivashkin (1948-2014), a long-standing Professor, Chair in Performance Studies, Director of the Centre for Russian Music, curator of the Alfred Schnittke Archive at Goldsmiths, University of London and a virtuoso cellist. The collection grew out of the Conference and Festival Orthodoxy, Music, Poli...

Knjiga "Paralelne istorije - Savremena srpska umetnička muzika u dijaspori" posvećena je kompozitorima koji su potekli iz Srbije, ali danas žive i rade širom sveta. Većina od njih ukupno šezdesetak napustila je Srbiju nakon raspada Jugoslavije. Za jednu malu i mladu muzičku kulturu, odlazak tolikog broja kompozitora predstavlja veliki gubitak. Stra...

In this article we observe the history of the International Review of Composers in Belgrade, the most enduring annual festival of contemporary art music in Serbia, founded in 1992. We have borrowed the syntagm ‘postsocialist condition’ from the title of the book edited by Aleš Erjavec (2003). The goal of this chapter is to examine the ‘breaking poi...

Monografija pod nazivom "Teorija i praksa Gesamtkunstwerka u XX i XXI veku – Operski ciklus SVETLOST / LICHT Karlhajnca Štokhauzena" rezultat je moje dugogodišnje fascinacije, s jedne strane, fenomenom Gesamtkunstwerka – sveobuhvatnog umetničkog dela – a s druge, stvaralaštvom Karlhajnca Štokhauzena, jednog od najmarkatnijih protagonista evropske m...

In this article we discuss the critical reception of the work of composer Stanojlo Rajičić (1910-2000), whose presence in the public musical life of Belgrade was noted already in the 1920s, when he was a student at the “Stanković” Music School and then the Belgrade Music School. The critical reception of his compositional work can be followed for a...

In his seminal comprehensive history of music(s) in the Balkan region, Jim Samson avoided the term “Balkan music” in favor of the less-binding title Music in the Balkans (Leiden: Brill, 2013). This, however, should not hinder us from probing the term “Balkan music” and its many connotations. In this editorial article for the Special Issue Balkan Mu...

Ten years after his influential book Such Freedom, if Only Musical: Unofficial Soviet Music during the Thaw (New York and Oxford, 2009), Peter J. Schmelz presents his second book, dedicated to Alfred Schnittke’s Concerto Grosso No. 1, as part of the recently initiated (2017) Oxford Keynotes series. The works selected to be covered in this series of...

Much has been written on the professional and personal trajectories of the two luminaries of Soviet/Russian music, Sergei Prokofiev and Dmitri Shostakovich. Their true relationship, however, has yet to be seriously explored. Many writers have focused on the composers’ alleged personal and professional antagonisms, caused by their supposed individua...

The term nesuđena avangarda (“undestined avant-garde”) was coined by Milorad Belančić to describe Vladan Radovanović’s unique artistic destiny. Although Radovanović was the only truly avant-garde Serbian composer in the post-World War II Yugoslavia, his output was overlooked and sidelined. In this article I discuss the circumstances that rendered R...

This book presents a continuation of Ivana Medić's interests started more than a decade ago, during her doctoral studies at the University of Manchester. The author considers paradoxes of the second, post-World War II wave of avant-garde music in the USSR, which emerged and developed in drastically changed circumstances in comparison to the early 2...

In this article I focus on the remarkable music videos of Jarboli – one of the most influential alternative rock bands from Belgrade, Serbia, who have been active since the early 1990s. I argue that, in their total oeuvre, music video is an art form equal to other creative outlets that the band members and their closest associates have dabbled in t...

Ten years ago, tasked with reviewing Marina Frolova-Walker’s first book Russian Music and Nationalism: From Glinka to Stalin (Yale University Press, 2007), I praised the author for dismantling long-standing myths and questioning the activities of some of the sacred cows of Russian music history, and for writing about the topics that “annoyed” her i...

Pierre Boulez (1925-2016) devoted a great deal of time and consideration to the relationship between the composer?s invention and performance media, in particular those related to the application of the latest technological breakthroughs and new instruments. Boulez?s famous essay ?Technology and the Composer? (1977/1986) proclaims his desire to wid...

Свој значајан јубилеј – седамдесет година од почетка рада, Музиколошки институт САНУ обележава у 2018. години низом манифестација које верно осликавају ширину тематског спектра, богату жанровску разноврсност, али и високу актуелност научне и културне мисије Института. Динамичан програм обележавања годишњице отворила је у марту месецу међународна ко...

This article deals with the soundscape of Mikser, an independent festival of contemporary creativity, established in 2009 in Belgrade, the capital city of Serbia. I focus on the years 2012-2016, during which Mikser was taking place in Savamala, an urban quarter in central Belgrade - which itself has undergone various urbanistic and cultural transfo...

This article deals with a work by a contemporary Serbian composer Miroslav Miša Savić (b. 1954): St. Lazarus Waltz for one or two grand pianos, with or without children's toy pianos. Since St. Lazarus is a children's holiday, the composer's idea was to depict children by toy pianos, while the grand pianos are 'parents'. The waltz exists in several...

In this article I analyze the reculturalization strategies implemented in Savamala, an urban quarter in central Belgrade. Recent years have witnessed many efforts to rebrand Belgrade as a safe, modern, cosmopolitan and tourist-friendly city. These initiatives transform the soundscape of Belgrade; sometimes the changes are byproducts of other develo...

This article focuses on Serbian composer Jovana Backović and her band/project Arhai, founded in Belgrade in 1998. The central argument is that Arhai made a transition from being regarded a part of the Serbian ethno music scene (which flourished during the 1990s and 2000s) to becoming a part of the global world music scene, after Jovana Backović mov...

Maria Cizmic’s new volume is the latest addition to the growing field of study of Eastern European music during Communist rule. Cizmic is Assistant Professor of Humanities at the University of South Florida, and an alumna of UCLA. The book had its first incarnation as her doctoral dissertation ‘Performing Pain: Music and Trauma in 1970s and 80s Eas...

The analysis of Alfred Schnittke’s Symphony No. 3 that I present in this paper is based on my study of Schnittke’s sketches from the Juilliard Manuscripts Collection. The importance of these manuscripts, which (to my knowledge) are discussed in a peer reviewed publication for the first time, is twofold. On the one hand, the sketches make it possibl...

Since the early 1980s Sofia Gubaidulina has received numerous accolades, and her music has been performed and recorded worldwide. However, the critics' reaction to her works has often been resoundly negative. In particular, Western critics have been baffled by Gubaidulina’s penchant for long durations, the employment of seemingly literal musical sy...

Judith Kuhn’s book is the latest addition to Ashgate’s excellent series of studies dedicated to various segments of Dmitri Shostakovich’s vast oeuvre. Considering that Shostakovich’s cycle of fifteen string quartets comprises some of the most popular and enchanting twentieth-century works for this ensemble, it is surprising that Kuhn’s book is prac...

From the late 1960s until the dissolution of the Soviet Union, numerous composers, especially those belonging to the generation born in the 1930s and commonly referred to as non-conformist, 'avant-garde' or 'unofficial', produced over 100 religious musical works. Some of these composers, such as Arvo Pärt (b. 1935) and Alfred Schnittke (1934–1998)...

This biography is the latest in the scholarly series Russian Music Studies, founded by Professor Malcolm Hamrick Brown and published by Indiana University Press since 1990. Kurtz’s original text (written in German and published in Stuttgart in 2001) has been slightly expanded and updated, and it is aptly translated by Christoph K. Lohmann. This is...

The term ′moderated modernism′ has been current for quite some time in Serbian music historiography, but there have been only a few attempts to define it. I shall try to define the term, introduce some of its key concepts and features and demonstrate its applicability. Although moderated modernism was an international phenomenon which had divergent...

In the course of his artistic career, which has lasted for more than fifty years now, Vladan Radovanović (b. Belgrade, 1932) has created works in the domains of electroacoustic music, mixed electronics, metamusic, visual arts artifugal projects, tactile art, literature, drawings of dreams, polymedial and vocovisual projects, as well as art theory....