Tijana Popović Mladjenović

MUSICOLOGICAL AND ETHNOMUSICOLOGICAL REFLECTIONS
(edited by Dragana Jeremić-Molnar and Ivana Stamatović)
Belgrade, Department of Music, University of Art, 2006, 173 pages,
ISBN 86-83745-61-1

Musicological and ethnomusicological reflections is the title of the published compilation of papers delivered at the Fifth Annual Gathering of the Department of Musicology and Ethnomusicology of the Faculty of music arts in Belgrade, held in April 2003. A substantial number of participants at this gathering, or to be more specific, eleven lecturers and Department associates, have submitted essays to be published in the mentioned compilation.

In correlation with the fact that the gathering itself – unlike some of the former and subsequent annual Department gatherings – had no ‘topic set in advance’, but rather, had to present the results of the participants’ research in progress, or in other words, their current individual involvement with certain issues and phenomena, while the editors of the compilation – Dragana Jeremić-Molnar and Ivana Stamatović – endeavored, “despite the heterogeneity of the topics dealt with” as they themselves stated, to point out “the particular challenging topics which have been separated as autonomous wholes”, whereas the entire publication retroactively acquired a more general, scientific-philosophical-poetic name – Musicological and ethnomusicological reflections. An appropriate visual transposition – suggested and/or recognized by the title, “caught’ at a specific moment – of the individual reflective musicological and ethnomusicological forces, embodied by the reproduction of the works by Edmund Kesting (Dore Hoyer, 1944), is also the result of the editors’ undertaking, in fact in this case it is an outcome of the cover design idea. The editors also created a name register for the entire compilation, whose publishing, we should add, was aided by the Ministry of science and environmental protection of the Republic of Serbia.

The seeking and meticulous examining of potential common denominators among the submitted papers has resulted in the segmenting of the compilation into four parts. The first part, entitled “Music in a rhetorical, semiotic, and communication discourse” contains two papers. In the study of art theoretician Miško Šuvaković, The rhetoric and semiology of music. Tentative general issues, firstly assessed are the general issues on the question of rhetoric (with the stressing that this matter “indicates a possibility of a tentative new interpretation subsequent to structuralism”) with the aim to “introduce into the discussion of music” the concept of rhetoric (the concept of “the rhetoric of music” is set in a correlation with the discourses of music and the meaning of a musical oeuvre), or rather, to set it as an “introduction into the debate on music semiology” (whereas subject to analysis on the path from the rhetoric of music to music semiology are concepts such as denotation, connotation, code, the signified and the signifier, which describe the establishing of musical meaning and the conveying of a musical message). In the space of interpreting the notion of communication – which implies the existing of the intention to communicate, a potential communicational influence on another person, as well as the imprinting of meaning into the person – lies in reality the sole ethnomusicological reflection of the compilation in which, under the title Functions of the communicational act in music folklore, author Mirjana Vučićević-Zakić considers the functions of the folklore musical expression (expressive or emotive, elucidatory; impressive or connative, appellative, injunctive, directive; phatic or contact; referential or objective, cognitive, contextual, denotative; poetic or esthetic; as well as metalinguistic or using metalanguage) according to the speech model of Roman Jakobson.

The second part of the collection, entitled “Music – event – genre”, is musicologically very specifically orientated, on one side towards the canon of performing (which relates to the presenting of works at concert programs – to the structuring and physiognomy of the concert repertoire as an institutional act with both a critical and ideological strength, and on whose foundation an awareness of music values develops), and on the other towards terminological issues (which significantly impact the awareness of the layering of notions and the phenomena to which they relate) linked with music (“canon” and “non-canon”) in the context of the Orthodox worshipping of god. Thus, in the study Concerts and their postmodern signs, Mirjana Veselinović-Hofman assesses, primarily from a methodological position, one of the aspects of the “surplus” of the meaning of a concert repertoire (on the example of a chosen “specimen” – a concert held in 2002 in Pretoria, South Africa at the International Festival of Classical Music) and expounds on the provocative topic of the existing of an analogy between a concert as a music manifestation and postmodern musical oeuvres (where the status of “finished” compositions in the process of creating a concert program is analogous to the status of musical contents of a different origin as building material in the process of postmodern composing). In the text entitled Music and the Orthodox worshipping of god. A question of terminology, Ivana Perković Radak suggests a terminological separating of expressions such as religious, ecclesiastical, worship, liturgical, paraliturgical or non-liturgical, extraliturgical, as well as spiritual music. In the text, this manifests itself as an “open” systematization (which basically does not derive from music issues but from the complex and layered determinations of the adjectives in the mentioned syntagms) and/or establishing a system of concepts which are assessed in a concentric order (depending on the function, text, contents, shapes, regulations, needs and character of the Orthodox worshiping ritual), and are convenient for further elaborating and additions.

The first two papers presented in the third part of the compilation, entitled “Music in Serbia”, first of all accentuate the sociological dimension of the problem they are dealing with. That is to say, speaking about the paper Оn the periodization of 19^th century music. The advantages of introducing the term ‘Biedermeier’ in the periodization of Serbian music., Tatjana Marković endeavors (pointing out the potential surpassing and superimposing of the traditionally set concept of style by perspectives based primarily on sociology and culture studies), to, along with the already present determination of the mentioned concept in the history of Serbian painting and literature (also defined as a culturological phenomenon and as a stylistic marker), denote the Biedermeier period in the history of Serbian music as a result of the micro and macrosociological research of this period, concluding that its introducing into historical, theoretical and culturological determination of 19^th century Serbian music as a social practice also marks a methodological path for further research in the semiotic coordinates of contemporary cultural theory in the area of music. In the paper entitled The role of piano music in the daily lives of the Serbian population up to 1914, Dragana Jeremić-Molnar accentuates the sociological implications of the placement of the piano and piano music-making (this time not in a context of creativity for this instrument, but in a framework of acquiring music literacy and basic music knowledge, and also in part the presenting of the interpretative skills of women in public) in the cultural discourse of the previously profiled and structurally and functionally differentiated social groups (based on class, property, status, and educational standards) of the Serbian population of the noted period.

Whereas the paper The repertoire of Belgrade recitals by music artists from Belgrade and other countries between two world wars (1918–1941) by Roksanda Pejović represents a systematization and a treatment of a subject matter originating from historiographical research of an invaluable relevance for every subsequent complex musicological evaluation of Belgrade’s music life of the first half of the 20^th century, the only ethnochoreological approach in the compilation by Olivera Vasić entitled The similarities and differences in the documenting of dances in Serbia in two different time periods of the 20^th century, indicates the beginnings of the documenting of traditional dances distinctive for our region, and furthermore also the research of this domain from the 70s of the last century, which resulted in establishing the ethnochoreological entities of Serbia and their systematic, still “open” possibilities for further research.

The last in this series of papers in the compilation is the study Теchnomusic in Serbia by Vesna Mikić, in which the evaluating of the very concept of technomusic as a medium and as a culturological phenomenon (or a problem of the correlation between technology and music, as well as the different outcome of this relationship in the sense of concrete technological and musical products) precedes the evaluating and explicating of the concept in the contexts of the history of electro-acoustic music and broadly depicting the historical chart of development of technomusic in our milieu with precisely marked and stressed points of the artistic presenting of this phenomenon.

The fourth, final part of the compilation, again realizes as a diptych of essays, has the title “Music in America”. This is a story about Henry Cowell. Or: Has prison changed the author? by Dragana Stojanović-Novičić, originating from the indicating of a long-term permeation or the deep imprinting of biographical elements – as ineradicable and inevitable traces of certain extreme life circumstances and situations, as well as personal, extremely private choices – into poetic and esthetic concepts, innovative strategies and procedures of a creative gesture of the apocryphal (but with an impassioned engagement of the analyzed) American musician – the piano player, composer, critic, organizer and propagator of “the new American music” of the first half of the last century. The study by Marija Masnikosa entitled Аmerican musical minimalism on the margin between modernism and postmodernism. A sketch for a broader theoretical debate оpens the question on the position of musical minimalism within the framework of the interchange of the ideology of modernism and postmodernism, that is, it attacks the problem of the ideological attribution of this movement (or, at least, its separate entities) which still, according to the author, has not been theoretically dealt with. Correlated with this, a theoretical debate on the introducing of a level of meaning in a minimalistic discourse is introduced, which, regardless of the way it is realized, has suppressed the modernistic neutrality of minimalistic processes onto a second plane and relinquished music to the “postmodern minimalism” of a Beaudrillardian ecstasy of communication.

In the end, we could say that provocation, innovation and openness are the dominant traits of almost all the musicological and ethnomusicological reflections presented here which, along with a sufficient degree of mutual dissimilarity and, at the same time, an adequate degree of similarity, realize a dynamic, live, interactive, layered dialogue flux, an intertextual and contextual, as well as multidimensionally and critically instigated dialogue on poetics, esthetics and the reception of the phenomenon of music in a communicational area which incessantly and in various ways diverges in a joint search for understanding the acknowledged, as well as the still unknown practices and meanings of music.

Translated by Elizabeta Holt