After zero hour: States as “custodians of universal human culture,” or “guardians of advanced art”

Abstract

The emergence of radically new, avant-garde movements in German music and throughout Western Europe after WW2 has often been seen as expressing a strivings to create on a tabula rasa, in order to create distance from the horrors of the recent past. In the countries of the communist bloc, the imposed ideology of socialist realism also created a sharp break, similar to that in the West, except that Zero Hour was conceived in quite a different fashion, as a move in the opposite direction from Western modernism. The case of post-war music in Yugoslavia is examined under the light of the fact that the country did not belong to either bloc. [Project of the Serbian Ministry of Education, Science and Technological Development, Grant no. 177004: Identities of Serbian Music from Local to Global Frames: Traditions, Changes, Challenges]

Keywords

• Zero Hour
• avant-garde music
• socialist realism and music
• Cold War
• Iron Curtain
• Serbian music
• Yugoslav music