"Daleki svijet muzikom dokuěen"("A distant world touched by music"): a contextual and critical study of Yugoslavian music as exemplified in the life and music of Josip Stolcer Slavenski (1896-1955)

Abstract

The core of this study is a contextual, critical and analytical study of the life and work of Josip Stolcer Slavenski (1886-1955). It consists of a brief outline of nineteenth-century socio-political, cultural and musical trends in the former Yugoslavia which serves as a broader context for the period of Moderna (avant-garde). This movement, which attempted to embrace new ideas and developments of mainstream western Europe, emerged at the end of the nineteenth century and played a major role in Slavenski's musical development. Parucular reference to Slavenski's circumstances are examined in the biographical chapter and his periods of study in Budapest, Prague and Paris are discussed, as is the important recognition of his music at the Donaueschingen Festival in the 1920s, and how the changing political climate of Yugoslavia, from monarchy to republic, influenced Slavenski's political and national affiliations. With this contextual backdrop, which includes reference to a number of Slavenski's contemporaries - namely Kodaly, Bartok, Suk, Novak, Hindemith, composers of the Second Viennese School, and his own Croatian, Serbian and Slovenian compatriots, the dissertation focusses on particular aspects of Slavenski's work with special emphasis on his use of Balkan folk music, his autodidactic theories of 'Astroacoustics', the expressionist fabric of his music, and the socialist realism of his later works during the 1940s and 1950s.In attempting to illuminate the nature of the 'Slavenski phenomena', this work also offers certain suggestions as to what might have been the reasons for the neglect and creative aridity of his later years. Furthermore, it is hoped that the conclusions of this study may in themselves provide an impetus for further research into Slavenski's work which has received little attention in English-speaking musicology.