Tatjana Marković

IMS, IAML, IAMIC 2006: Gothenburg, Sweden

For the first time, in June 19-23, 2006, in Gothenburg, Sweden, a meeting of three international associations together took place: the International Musicological Society, the International Association of Musical Libraries, Archives, and Documentation Centers, and the International Association of Music Information Centers (http://www.smbf.nu/iaml-iamic-ims2006). Four representatives of Serbia, musicologists from the Department of Musicology, Faculty of Music, Mirjana Veselinović-Hofman and Tatjana Marković, afterwards director of the Music Information Centre in Belgrade, Ana Kotevska, as well as the chief of the Library at the Faculty of Music, Radmila Milinković, joined the conference of the three societies respectively.

The conference of the International Musicological Society, under the name Contemporary classical music, included about forty select papers by scholars from fifteen countries such as Sweden, Denmark, Lithuania, Germany, United Kingdom, France, Switzerland, Austria, Serbia, as well as Japan, South Africa, United States, and others. After an insight into the program and the topics of the delivered papers, it might be surprising that the majority of the papers were dedicated to individual composers, in many cases even to particular compositions, while the others were based on surveys of national historiographies or genres. Namely, more extensive surveys, works by certain composers, and individual compositions were also «patterns» for considering the ways in which classical tradition has been present (in the field of classical and popular music), its status, and the ways of its (re)defining. Related to this, the systematic consideration of the presence of «classicality» in European postmodern music through redefined norms was a topic of the paper by Mirjana Veselinović-Hofman (The nature of post-modern classicality in European music ).

Considering the prevailing focus on the opus of individual composers, from the Renaissance and Baroque to the contemporary ones – along with the so-called «great» composers (Bach, Mozart, Bartók, Messiaen, Cage, La Monte Young, Morton Feldman, and others), presented were also the composers not included in the mainstream of the constructed European musical canon (Arnold van Wyk, David Lumsdaine, René Leibowitz, Allan Petersson). While this issue was probed only through an analysis of select compositions or through the exposing of uninvestigated lists of publications, in the majority of this group’s papers, the chosen composers' works were contextualized in relation to the issues of the canon, perception, ideology of an opera libretto. It seems that a synthetic methodology of these contextualizations was especially creatively accomplished in the paper by Deryl Jamieson (Real frogs in an imaginary pond: Magical realism and the music of Morton Feldman), Chris Walton (Alphorns in Arcadia: Daphne's classical urge), as well as by Björn Heile, Kirsten Yri and Michael Hooper, from the session Canonical construction .

The papers providing a panorama-view were mainly related to contemporary music (Swedish music after World War II, contemporary Ukrainian music, Lithuanian music of the post-Soviet period, for instance), then to the issue of the status and treatment of folk tunes in classical music (19^th and 20^th-century Serbian folk music, neo-folk elements in Lithuanian music, the presence and treatment of tradition in contemporary German classical music), the question of the relation between popular and classical music, aesthetics and music, the very contemporary problem of music in both printed media (music writings and the problem of their dispersion, historiographies), and recordings, and the presence of «classicality»» in postmodern music or the neo-tonality of new music. Serbian music was considered from the aspect of an approach to folk music from the early 19^th to the end of the 20^th century (Tatjana Marković’s paper Classical vs. Popular in musical writings perception – The case of Serbian folksong settings ), as well as in the framework of a wider consideration of postmodern European music (Mirjana Veselinović-Hofman).

The activities of the institutions collaborating with the International Musicological Society were also presented, including the session of papers related to music iconography (Répertoire International d'Iconographie Musicale) organized by Antonio Baldassarre, then an extensive report for the 40^th anniversary of RILM (Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale) by Barbara Dobbs-Mackenzie, and also a very interesting web-presentation by Robert Cohen about improving the database of periodicals 1800-1950 for the 25^th anniversary of RIPM (Répertoire international de la presse musicale). The national committees of RILM presented their annual reports, including one about Serbian music bibliography by Tatjana Marković, who also took part at the session of the international group for music archives, related to the database of archival documents and music manuscripts. Ana Kotevska reported about the institution's activity at the meeting of IAMIC, and Radmila Milinković joined the section of music libraries at the IAML meeting.

It seems that the «classical» aspect of contemporary music has in a specific way affected the underlined presence of classical musicological topics, as well as the classical approach to contemporary musicology, at least the part presented at the iMS meeting in 2006.

Translated by the author