The East and the West in the polemical context of the Serbian music between the two World Wars

Abstract

This article represents a fragment of the author's doctoral dissertation Serbian Music at the Crossroads of the East and the West? On the Dialogue between the Traditional and the Modern in Serbian Music between the Two World Wars (the review of the thesis see on www.newsound.org.yu, issue No 24). The thesis (mentor: prof. Dr Mirjana Veselinović-Hofman) was defended at the Faculty of Music, Belgrade, on January 2004. A revised text of the dissertation is forthcoming, in an edition of the Institute of Musicology of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts. The article describes the creative orientation of composers Miloje Milojević, Petar Konjović and Josip Slavenski as the key figures of the epoch, indicates their choices of an Eastern or Western orientation, and explains the antagonism between the poetics of the "Europeans" and the representatives of avant-garde trends. The topicality of the East-West dichotomy in the critical consciousness of the protagonist of this period is marked as one of the main and the most important dilemma of the polemical context of the Serbian art after the World War I. Conducted from standpoints "Pro et Contra Europe", East-West discussion was also the part of the debate of Serbian national art's development strategy in the new, modern epoch of its history.