The political and cultural isolation of postwar Yugoslavia posed unprecedented challenges for composers who sought to continue pursuing the newest trends and innovations in their music. While the majority of Yugoslav composers, either with open arms or out of necessity, accepted socialist realism – the official doctrine of the new communist state – its negative effects on those whose artistic expression did not fit the boundaries delineated by the doctrine were tremendous. Croatian composer Milko Kelemen succinctly explains the dilemma composers like him – caught in the political division of Cold War Europe and the experimentation with new ideologies – were facing: “I was very dissatisfied with the state of affairs, particularly as my own work as a composer was in a state of crisis: I was not prepared to accept the ideology of the Eastern Bloc, nor had I had an opportunity to acquaint myself with the pluralistic tendencies of the West.”Footnote ¹

Traveling outside of Yugoslavia was virtually impossible during the 1950s; like many other countries of the Eastern Bloc, the Yugoslav government imposed harsh travel restrictions on its citizens in order to prevent massive migration. In an opportunity afforded to a small number of citizens, Kelemen was able to secure a scholarship in 1954 to study with Olivier Messiaen and Darius Milhaud in Paris and with Wolfgang Fortner in Freiburg and to attend major international music festivals in Darmstadt. Upon his return to Yugoslavia in 1960, Kelemen found it even more unbearable to compose, noting that after “returning from the ‘outside world,’” he grew more frustrated because “it had become obvious that music in Yugoslavia lagged at least 80 years behind that of Europe.”Footnote ² Rather than succumbing to the conditions imposed by socialist realism, including a compromise to seriously moderate his modernist tendencies, Kelemen had an entirely different idea. Taking advantage of Cold War tensions, he devised a plan that would establish Zagreb as the center of new music in Yugoslavia. Kelemen envisioned the founding of an international music festival of new music, the first of its kind in the Balkan region, which would attract composers and performers from both sides of the Iron Curtain. His vision came to full fruition in May 1961 with the launching of the spectacularly successful inaugural Music Biennale Zagreb (MBZ), which immediately became one of the most significant festivals of new music in Europe and would drastically change the trajectory of music expression and aesthetics in Yugoslavia.

1961: The Inaugural Music Biennale Zagreb

The division of Europe into the Eastern and Western Blocs may be an oversimplification of the postwar rivalries of the sociopolitical and economic models. Still, the cultural binary opposition of the two worlds seems apt. The West was guided by modernist, avant-garde explorations and technological innovations, while the East adhered to traditional forms and music that sought to appeal to the masses. In such a partitioned world, festivals of new music served a special role of enabling the exchange of ideas from both ideological worlds, making the Iron Curtain less impermeable. While a handful of notable festivals specializing in new music were formed in Europe before the Second World War – including the Donaueschingen Festival (launched in 1921), the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM) (1923), and the Venice Biennale (1930) – those that emerged during the Cold War, such as concert series at Darmstadt, Paris, London, and Rome, played a pivotal role in cultural diplomacy. The most exceptional of them was the Warsaw Autumn International Festival of Contemporary Music in Poland, inaugurated in 1956 during the Khrushchev Thaw.Footnote ³ For Poland, a country that had joined the Communist Bloc after the war and officially adopted socialist realism in 1949, staging a state-sponsored event specializing in new music was a symbolic display of opposing aesthetics.Footnote ⁴

Yugoslavia’s position during the Cold War was uniquely advantageous. The country had initially joined the Eastern Bloc in 1946 and adopted the doctrine of socialist realism. However, a geopolitical dispute concerning Yugoslavia’s support of the communist insurgency in Greece, as well as its quest to add Albania into the Yugoslav federation despite Stalin’s objections, led to the Yugoslav–Soviet split, also referred to as the Tito–Stalin split, in 1948. The hostile dispute resulted in Yugoslavia severing its ties with the Soviet Union and also severely damaging its relationship (especially economically) with the communist Eastern Bloc, which had even threatened to attack Yugoslavia. As the only country to successfully flee the Soviet Bloc, Yugoslavia caught the attention of the Western Bloc, including the United States, which started to develop economic ties with the communist country. Tito’s new Communist government introduced a new “third way” economic model of self-management and social ownership, thus creating a distinct type of market socialism.

Abandoning socialist realism as the official aesthetic principle, Tito’s “avant-garde” communism was short-lived. Tanja Zimmermann maintains that pseudo-avant-garde forms in art appeared only during the interim period of Tito’s promotion of the “third way” in 1948. As soon as it was adopted, social and cultural models went back to the origins of communism – the ideologies of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, rather than Lenin or Stalin – and thus took inspiration from Russian constructivism.Footnote ⁵ Already by 1948, the avant-garde had been forcefully disappeared and was immediately replaced by a new “local canon” of folklore and appeal to the masses.Footnote ⁶

Upon his return from the West, Kelemen concocted a plan that would take advantage of Yugoslavia’s unique political position as a communist country yet a liberal one, not belonging to either bloc. With an economic model that had elements of both socialism and a Western market economy, Yugoslavia had the capacity to lure composers and performers from both sides of the divide. Thus, establishing a new festival in a “neutral” country had the potential to not only establish Zagreb as the new cultural center in Yugoslavia but also become a crucial point of cultural exchange between the East and the West. Playing on the tensions between the two worlds, Kelemen first traveled to Moscow to meet with Yekaterina Furtseva, the Soviet minister of culture, a staunch communist, and Stalin’s good friend. Kelemen told her that Yugoslavia was at a political crossroads and that with ever-stronger influences from the United States and the West, he would like to see Soviet composers and ensembles represented at his envisioned festival. Furtseva, on the spot, offered to send the Bolshoi Ballet and the Moscow Philharmonic to the inaugural Music Biennale Zagreb, with all expenses paid.Footnote ⁷ After securing the participation of the leading Soviet ensembles, Kelemen traveled to Washington, DC to meet with a representative from the Department of State, informing them that the Soviet Union instantly took interest in participating in his festival and on their own initiative even insisted on sending their best musicians with full expenses paid. Amplifying the Cold War rivalry between the two powers, Kelemen urged the US to send their top ensembles, such as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the San Francisco Ballet, or risk exposing volatile Yugoslavia to a strong Soviet presence. Such pressure would likely have huge ramifications on the country’s relationship with the West. Kelemen recalls how his script played out with such ease, just as he had imagined it:

Kelemen concludes, “Once I managed to secure the Russians and the Americans, the rest was a relatively easy task. They don’t call me the musical politician for no reason.”Footnote ⁹ Although Cage’s attendance, the performances by the San Francisco Ballet, the Moscow Philharmonic, and the productions of Berg’s operas would not occur until the second edition of the festival in 1963, Kelemen’s plan, for the most part, worked. The biggest obstacle to his scheme came not from abroad but from within Yugoslavia. Upon his return from his trips to the USSR and the US, Kelemen was arrested and questioned for two days about the intent of his travels. Even after his release, the Central Committee of the League of Communists, the country’s highest ruling body, called for a ban on the festival, fearing that bringing guests from both the East and the West would expose Yugoslavia to the “decline and decadence of bourgeois Western society,” which the Communist Party saw as “detrimental to the development of socialist culture.”Footnote ¹⁰ The Central Committee in Slovenia came to Zagreb to meet with Kelemen and specifically inquire about Cage, who was scheduled to appear at the inaugural event. They had heard that the American composer was known for “crawling under the piano” and “making a circus” out of music concerts, and if that were his plan in Zagreb, they assured Kelemen that the festival would certainly be banned. Alas, Cage did not make it to the 1961 festival, and Kelemen, together with the festival’s promoter and director, worked tirelessly to appease the Yugoslav government and organize one of the most revolutionary musical events at the time.

The inaugural MBZ was perhaps more than Kelemen or anyone else could have imagined. The event spanned one week, May 17–24, 1961, and featured multiple concerts per day with concurrent workshops, symposia, lectures, film presentations, and exhibitions. The festival’s ambitious program included all styles and aesthetics of the twentieth century, covering the repertoire ranging from Debussy and Ravel to Schoenberg and Berg, but also Soviet “traditionalists” like Prokofiev, the Darmstadt serialists, the “Polish School” aleatoric composers, electronic music, and Cage’s experimentation.Footnote ¹¹ Those in attendance included Kagel, who conducted the Cologne Ensemble für Neue Musik, Lutosławski, Pierre Schaeffer, Petrassi, and Stockhausen, among many others. Yugoslav composers, especially those from Croatia (Milo Cipra, Natko Devčić, Krešimir Fribec, Kelemen, Fran Lhotka, Mihovil Logar, Ivo Malec, Boris Papandopulo, Branimir Sakač, Josip Štolcer-Slavenski, and Stjepan Šulek) and Slovenia (Josip Kalčić, Slavko Osterc, Primož Ramovš, and Alojz Srebotnjak) were strongly represented, with only two Serbian composers included in the program (Ljubica Marić and Dušan Radić).

Writing for the New York Times, Everett Helm noted that the “wide diversity of styles, techniques, and aesthetic approaches displayed by living Yugoslav composers” was striking at the inaugural event.Footnote ¹² However, the critic also observed that, unlike Yugoslav visual arts, which had kept in tandem with the West and produced abstract works that had received international acclaim, music was much more conservative. He wrote, “Only a few composers, such as Milko Kelemen, the enfant terrible of Yugoslav music, have experimented with those post-Webern forms and techniques that have emerged in postwar Western Europe.”Footnote ¹³ Helm continued, “For the majority, tonality forms the indispensable basis of composition, but within the framework of tonality there are many gradations observable.” He specifically pointed out Šulek’s opera, Coriolanus, as being “unabashedly romantic,” which to him recalled the music of Wagner, Strauss, and Mussorgsky and of Papandopulo’s Third Piano Concerto as rooted in tonality with occasional excursions into dissonance and the jazz idiom. Cipra’s Three Encounters was recognized for his affinity to French music, with Helm describing these pieces as “short, clear, unpretentious, and pleasant,” while Radić’s “pseudo-surrealistic” ballet The Ballad of the Vagabond Moon was a work that unsuccessfully combines elements of Prokofiev and Bartók with jazz. The most notable Yugoslav works for the New York Times critic were Malec’s orchestral piece, Movements in Color, which he found harmonically adventurous for “abounding in strong dissonance and bordering in atonality,” and Kelemen’s “excellent” serial work, Skolion for Orchestra.

Helm was also fascinated by the display of Yugoslav “exceedingly rich” folk music, evident in Devčić’s opera The Witch of Labin, in which the composer integrated Istrian folk into a “nonschematic texture of freely dissonant tonality,” and also in Marić’s Songs of Space, which the critic described as “perhaps the festival’s most successful work [of this nature]” and an “impressive piece for chorus and orchestra that develops a truly original atmosphere.”Footnote ¹⁴

However, under the subheading “Avant-Garde,” Helm did not refer to any Yugoslav composers. He accurately asserted that the two appearances by the Cologne New Music Ensemble, conducted by Kagel, provided the Yugoslav composers, performers, and audiences with their first opportunity to hear the most “advanced” trends coming from Western Europe and the US. The reactions were certainly mixed. While the Parrenin Quartet’s interpretations of Martinet, Schoenberg, Maderna, and Bartók received a well-deserved standing ovation, the audience was left “bewildered” and listened only out of politeness to Cage’s Piano Concerto performed by David Tudor. The audience was also not receptive toward the Ensemble für Neue Musik, conducted by Kagel, or to electronic music by Ligeti, Eimert, and Koenig. Undoubtedly, the most unbearable experience for the audience was Stockhausen’s forty-minute Kontakte for piano, percussion, and tape recorder, which caused a “moderate storm of protests.”

Certain composers, most of them from Serbia, such as Aleksandar Obradović (1927–2001), but also a Croat Petar Bergamo (1930–2022), and a Slovene Marijan Lipovšek (1910–1995), criticized the selection of Yugoslav composers who were chosen to represent “Yugoslav music” at the Biennale. They argued that those works did not accurately represent either Yugoslav music or the “most advanced” Yugoslav music at the time. As such, in their view, the programming committee did little good for their country and only created a total “disorientation” of the status of Yugoslav composers.Footnote ¹⁵ But the presentation of the Yugoslav aesthetic on a big international stage was accurate, and the criticism was necessary. Bergamo put it succinctly by noting that music Yugoslavia had thus far considered “advanced” was nothing more than music written in the style of Stravinsky, Bartók, Webern, and similar.Footnote ¹⁶ The Biennale finally forced Yugoslav composers to face the uncomfortable truth.

The First Music Biennale Zagreb left Yugoslav composers “bewildered” and disheartened. It was a shattering and life-changing experience for many. This reaction was not entirely unforeseen. As Milin points out, except for Malec and Kelemen, who had been living in Paris since the mid 1950s, only a handful of Yugoslav composers had a chance to travel abroad and learn about new musical techniques. In Serbia, they were Enriko Josif and Radić, in Croatia, Devčić and Stanko Horvat, and in Slovenia, Janez Matičič and Alojz Srebotnjak, with no composers from other republics.Footnote ¹⁷ Thus, for most Yugoslav composers who were educated in the postwar period, the Zagreb festival was their first exposure to actual avant-garde music. Musicologist Ivana Medić aptly sums up the aftermath of the inaugural MBZ, writing that many composers went through “creative crises,” causing some to completely abandon composition and others to try to “modernize” their aesthetic.Footnote ¹⁸ But for Kelemen, his festival achieved exactly what he set out to do: It brought avant-garde artists from both blocs to Yugoslavia, exposed his peers and audiences to the newest achievements in modern music, and provided Yugoslav composers with the affirmation they sought on one of the largest international scenes.

The 1960s: The Post-Biennale Avant-Garde Scene and the Influence of the Polish School

For young Yugoslav composers, who were eager to hear the newest musical styles and learn about avant-garde techniques, which were impossible to acquire at their traditionally oriented home institutions, the inaugural MBZ was a true spectacle and the opportunity of a lifetime. Rajko Maksimović (1935–2024), still an undergraduate student of composition at the Music Academy in Belgrade in 1961, recalls how he and his friends from the Academy flocked to Zagreb “en masse” to experience this valuable exchange of information and to witness the “affirmation” of Yugoslav composers, especially of his professors.Footnote ¹⁹

In his review of the concert, published in a special issue of the journal Zvuk dedicated to the impressions from Zagreb that were written by Yugoslav composers, critics, and musicologists, Maksimović relays his enthusiasm and excitement about the festival. But he also reveals his implicit and explicit prejudices and limitations owing to the circumstances of his overpoweringly conservative education in Belgrade. The fact that he dismissively refers to nonconventional music as “events” or as “music” in scare quotes is telling:

Maksimović offered harsh criticism of Western avant-garde music that “rejects all compositional principles, even the aesthetics of traditional music,” especially the kind he heard in the works by Boulez and Stockhausen, which he described as music that lacked any positive value, a step backward in the progress of music, and music created out of mere interest in the experimentation with new acoustical means. The works by Messiaen and Nono, who, according to him, achieved “true art” with their explorations of new sounds and technologies, stood out. Even though Maksimović did not even comment on Cage, likely because it was not “worth it” in a “serious critique,” other reviews reveal that, unsurprisingly, Tudor’s performance of Cage’s Concert for Piano and Orchestra, despite its “exhibitionism,” was the most talked about and attended event at the Biennale.Footnote ²¹ The works of Cage were, at the time, incomprehensible for Yugoslav composers and audiences alike and would remain so for another decade and a half.

Other musical trends presented at the concert had a profound effect on the course of Yugoslav music. Although Yugoslavia did not have the means for electroacoustical explorations in the early 1960s, the festival inspired a handful of composers to travel abroad and work in the newly established electronic music studios in Europe and the US. While Kelemen continued to live abroad, studying at the Siemens Studio for Electronic Music in Munich, Maksimović, Devčić, and Obradović went to the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center in New York City in the mid 1960s. Ludmila Frajt and Josip Kalčič headed to the Experimental Music Studio of Czechoslovak Radio Plzeň, and Vladan Radovanović worked at the Polish Radio Experimental Studio in Warsaw.

Serialism, let alone integral serialism, was never fully accepted in Yugoslavia. At the Inaugural Biennale, the Italian group of composers – Luigi Dallapiccola, Alfredo Casella, Giorgio Federico Ghedini, and Goffredo Petrassi – merely showed Yugoslav composers that “strict serialism” can nonetheless elicit a “true inspiration as the means of expression.”Footnote ²² However, in his introductory speech for the Second Biennale, Kelemen explicitly noted that there was a certain hostility among Yugoslav composers toward serialism, alongside different kinds of biases toward the new, which he had been trying to correct with the founding of the festival.Footnote ²³ Nonetheless, even in the decades to come, only a small number of Yugoslav composers experimented with quasi-serial techniques, and very few attended the Darmstadt Summer Courses.

However, aleatoric and sonoristic techniques, presented by Polish composers at the 1961 Biennale, left Yugoslav composers in awe. Maksimović wrote the following glowing impression in his review:

Radovanović similarly emphasized that Górecki’s piece was a work that left the deepest impression on him because it resembled the aesthetic and expression that he was, at that time, developing in his own style of composing – hyperpolyphony: “Henryk Górecki’s piece Scontri left the strongest impression on me at the first MBZ. I remember thinking how that piece is somehow similar to Sferoön, which I had already been working on by then.”Footnote ²⁵ The aesthetic of the “Polish School composers,” as Yugoslav composers referred to them, who at the time were considered leaders of the postwar avant-garde, was pitted against Soviet music, heavily constricted by socialist realism. The critics took advantage of this polarization as a metaphor for the current political situation in Yugoslavia – a country that was open to and collaborated with both the East and the West.Footnote ²⁶ It was also a reality in which Yugoslav composers operated: While a small number were fascinated and influenced by the avant-garde music they heard at the Biennale, most composers, critics, musicologists, and music directors, especially those in Belgrade, heavily guarded traditionalism and stood as gatekeepers for any movement toward the avant-garde. However, for a handful of young composers from Belgrade, MBZ was the beginning of a musical revolution. Upon their return to Belgrade, perceiving the Polish School as a “true direction of contemporary music” unlike the Cage-style experimentation,Footnote ²⁷ they began exploring and applying new avant-garde procedures in their own works.

The modernization of Yugoslav music still lagged behind contemporary trends in the West and the East, which came to a full display at the second edition of the Biennale, held May 8–16, 1963. While the presence of Yugoslav composers (mostly Croatian and Slovenian, who were more open to modernism and musical contacts from abroad) was notably programmed more heavily, with nearly two dozen appearances, their music was still perceived as anything but avant-garde. American composer Gunther Schuller, whose work was also performed in Zagreb, summed up his impressions in his review for the New York Times: “Yugoslav music was featured heavily in the concerts but was uniformly unable to rise above a well embedded ‘epic,’ bombastic, national style, irrespective of whether the language was diatonic or serial.”Footnote ²⁸

Serbian composer Obradović yet again criticized the selection of Yugoslav composers programmed at the Second Biennale, fittingly asking whether the Biennale was an event for only Croatian composers from Zagreb, or whether it ought to represent a real overview of new music from across Yugoslavia. He further questioned what kind of music ought to be represented at the Biennale – music that exhibits all current Yugoslav trends, including folklore (i.e., nationalism), or only music that follows the newest avant-garde currents.Footnote ²⁹ Nonetheless, there were works by seven Serbian composers performed at the Second Biennale, which featured a variety of styles, ranging from electronic music by Ernö Király, Marić’s Octoicha 1 based on Byzantine church chants, traditional chamber music by Maksimović, choral music by Radić, a ballet by Gostuški, and avant-garde chamber music by Radovanović. Still, the music presented by all Yugoslav composers, whose aesthetic was comparable to Stravinsky and Berg (the two featured composers at the 1963 Biennale), paled in comparison to the contemporary avant-garde currents on both sides of the Curtain. The festival’s conception was structured around highlighting one living and one nonliving “master” of the twentieth century. For Schuller, the performances of Stravinsky, Webern, and the Polish avant-garde by the Kraków Philharmonic, under the baton of Andrzej Markowski, stood out, while the productions of Berg’s Wozzeck and Lulu fell somewhat flat. Stravinsky, a guest of honor at the festival, took part in conducting his Symphony in Three Movements at one of the concerts dedicated entirely to his music.

The 1963 Biennale brought many notable composers, including Stravinsky, Robert Craft, Lutosławski, Penderecki, Nono, Berio, Maderna, Luc Ferrari, Pierre Schaeffer, and Bogusław Schaeffer. The most talked-about and controversial figure, yet again, was Cage, whose presence in Zagreb, together with Tudor and the San Francisco Dancers’ Workshop Company, nearly caused the authorities to cancel the festival. Kelemen recalls going to Cage’s hotel room the night before the concert and begging him not to crawl under the piano, as such behavior would risk shutting down the entire event. According to Kelemen, Cage promised not to do it. Kelemen continues describing Cage’s performance, which was scheduled to start at midnight:

Cage and Tudor made two appearances at the 1963 Biennale – in a lecture and a concert, which Schuller described as a “dance-pantomime … in conception very close to a ‘happening’ through more consequentially and cohesively organized.”Footnote ³¹ For the critic, Cage was “regretfully” a representative of “American music” to an average Biennale visitor, and despite being amusing or titillating, his presence gave the impression that American music could hardly be construed as “serious.”Footnote ³²

However, it was the Polish School of avant-gardists that once again made the strongest impact on Yugoslav composers, many of whom immediately adopted aleatoric and sonoristic techniques.Footnote ³³ The Kraków Philharmonic Chamber Orchestra, conducted by Markowski, performed Górecki’s Canti strumentali, Kotoński’s Canto, Penderecki’s Violin Concerto, Serocki’s Segmenti, Schaeffer’s S’alto, and Lutosławski’s Trois poèmes d’Henri Michaux. For instance, Ludmila Frajt was particularly drawn to Lutosławski’s aleatory textures, Penderecki’s use of clusters and the nonstandard treatment of instruments, and Ligeti’s micropolyphony, which form the basis of the expression of her subsequent oeuvre. Lutosławski inspired Maksimović to write Tri Haiku [Three haiku] for two female choirs and twenty-three instruments in 1967, which Maksimović premiered at the Fourth (1967) Biennale. And for a group of Yugoslav avant-garde composers from Belgrade – Petar Ozgijan [Oshgian] (1932–1979), Petar Bergamo, Berislav Popović (1931–2002), and Zoran Hristić (1938–2019) – their venture into modernism was illustrated by the implementation of quasi-serial and aleatory techniques in their works.

New (Subdued) Currents in 1960s Yugoslav Music

In his 1971 discussion of “Contemporary Trends in Yugoslav Music,” a Bosnian music historian and critic, Zija Kučukalić, realistically portrayed the situation of modernist trends in the country, noting that Yugoslav composers rejected their Indigenous folk elements and eagerly turned to European (i.e., “foreign”) influences:

Assessing modernist trends across each republic of the federation, he observes that Slovenian composers (such as Uroš Krek, Primož Ramovš, and Janez Matičič, and then Jakob Jež, Pavle Merku, Milan Stibilj, Ivo Petrić, and Alojz Srebotnjak, and later Darijan Božič, Vinko Globokar, and Lojze Lebič), because of their geographical proximity to the West, were the first to encounter contemporary trends, which is the reason their musical palette was wider and more fertile. Speaking of Croatian trends, he notes the deep Romantic tradition in the republic and the presence of socialist realism and nationalism. However, he argues that the postwar generation made great strides toward modernism. He especially highlights an inclination toward experimenting with sound in the works by Kelemen and Malec, but also compliments Devčić, Sakač, Kresimir Fribec, Stanko Horvat, Ruben Radica, Zlatko Pibernik, Adalbert Marković, and Dubravko Detoni. While Serbian music still relied heavily on tradition and neoclassicism, Kučukalić points out that several stylistic trends were fully developing side by side, though none can truly be described as “avant-garde”:

Kučukalić’s overview of modern trends in Macedonia and Bosnia and Herzegovina is more significant because composers from these smaller republics have been historically marginalized and seldom recognized (or programmed). For Macedonian composers, he observes their “rich folk inheritance” as evident in the works by Vlastimir Nikolovski (1925–2001). Toma Zografski (1934–2000), on the other hand, is “freer in accepting the influence of the West,” while Toma Prošev (1931–1996) “moves away from tradition most persistently and consistently.”Footnote ³⁶ Kučukalić positions contemporary music aesthetics in Bosnia and Herzegovina within three categories:

Kučukalić’s realistic assessment of not-so-advanced tendencies among Yugoslav composers explains why the Third Biennale, held on May 12–23, 1965, featured a heavily reduced presence by the nation’s composers: only one work from Serbia (Marić’s Byzantine Concerto), one composer from Macedonia (Prošev), a handful of composers from Slovenia (Horvat, Petrić, Ramovš, Srebotnjak, and Stibilj), and seven composers from Croatia, most prominently Kelemen and Malec, were programmed.Footnote ³⁸ With notable guests participating in the Biennale, including Stockhausen, Maderna, Lukas Foss, Pierre Schaeffer, Messiaen, Cathy Berberian, and Shostakovich, among others, the reviews of works by Yugoslav composers, once again, were disappointing. In his review for the New York Times, Helm generously complimented Kelemen’s two stage-works, although likely out of courtesy. He promptly observed that Kelemen’s language did not depart from the aesthetic of the early twentieth century and even referred to Kelemen’s techniques as “advanced” in scare quotes:

For Kelemen’s other work, a short opera, The New Tenant, Helm wrote that it “contained some interesting moments but was musically a bit on the thin side.” Helm then noted that calling this work “opera” is “perhaps the wrong word, for much of the dialogue was spoken or half-sung to an accompaniment that was more in the nature of background music.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Overall, Helm generously remarked that compositions representing Yugoslavia at the Third Biennale showed that the composers have made a strong effort to keep in step with Western European trends when considering that the country, until recently, was strongly inclined toward traditionalism. Nonetheless, Helm singled out Radica’s 19 and 10, Interferences as a particularly unsuccessful piece, describing it as “a hysterical work” with which the composer illustrated that he had “not digested the materials with which he was working.”Footnote ⁴¹

German critic Ulrich Dibelius offered a blunt assessment of Yugoslav modernism displayed at the first three editions of the MBZ. In stark comparison to the Warsaw Autumn, Dibelius stated that the third rendition of the festival in Zagreb clearly showed that modernism had not grown or developed any further in Yugoslavia since the festival’s debut, and that the general capacity of composers in Yugoslavia was evidently lesser than in Poland.Footnote ⁴² Dibelius was partly correct – Yugoslav composers had no capacity for growth in their modernist expression by 1965 because they could not. For one, the stronghold of those composers and critics preserving the aesthetic of socialist realism was almost impenetrable. Composers teaching at the Music Academy in Belgrade were hired during the postwar period, a period during which socialist realism was implemented. Many of them were either members of the Communist Party or strict followers of the socialist message of unity and brotherhood and thus believed in writing music that was accessible to the audiences. This approach allowed them to maintain their powerful positions and have their music performed. Others, like Vlastimir Peričić or Dragutin Gostuški, stopped composing and focused on writing pedagogical textbooks and critiques, further cementing the traditional canon. For instance, following the Fourth Biennale, Gostuški wrote a critique titled “A Crisis of False Progress,” which may be regarded as the author’s anti-avant-garde manifesto.Footnote ⁴³ In it, without concealing his contempt for the avant-garde, Gostuški stated that, as a music critic, he felt “swindled” by the direction of music in Yugoslavia – instead of “evolving,” it was moving “backward” into the realm of pure academicism and becoming nothing more than “legalized terror.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Considering the mindset of traditionalist composers and those in power, it was unrealistic to expect the new postwar generation of composers to either embrace or understand modernism – modern music was not taught in institutions in many parts of the country, most notably Belgrade, the capital of Yugoslavia. Rather, these young composers spent their formative years under the strict guidance of their conservative professors (like Stanojlo Rajičić), who imposed their narrow scope of what music is and impressed their own biases on future generations. It would take more than a decade – until the late 1970s – before a young group of students would even dare defy their teachers and stand up for their own convictions and interests.Footnote ⁴⁵

Further, by 1961, the year of the inaugural Biennale, Yugoslavia was just starting to open to the West and repair its ties with the Eastern Bloc. While the break with the USSR in 1948 brought on a gradual liberalization of cultural activities, the change was slow. For instance, traveling outside the country was possible, but it was still far from easy, and securing the funds to do so was quite a challenge. Acquiring music scores, records, or books from abroad was almost impossible; there was one shop in Belgrade that had a limited selection of “modern” music, such as scores by Stravinsky and Bartók. There were no ensembles in Yugoslavia yet that specialized in playing new music, and it was not until 1965 that the Third Program of Radio Belgrade – a station that specialized in new music – was established.

While there were pockets of resistance by those composers who truly pursued the exploration of avant-garde music, they were few, and many of them no longer lived in Yugoslavia. Most notably, Croatian composer Malec left for Paris in 1955 and worked in the domain of electronic music with Pierre Schaeffer and the Groupe de Recherche de Musique Concrète. Franco-Slovenian composer Vinko Globokar, who made his debut at the Zagreb Biennale in 1967, had also been living in Paris since 1955, where he studied with René Leibowitz and, the following decade, in Berlin with Luciano Berio.Footnote ⁴⁶ In Serbia in the 1960s, while several composers had studied in Darmstadt and electronic music studios in Poland, Plzeň, and the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center in New York – including Maksimović, Obradović, Frajt, and Radovanović – all but Radovanović abandoned electronic music and avant-garde aesthetics upon their return. Radovanović, regarded as a “rogue” composer who was never embraced by the Music Academy in Belgrade nor by his peers or critics, eventually founded his own institution in 1972, the Electronic Studio of the Third Program of Radio Belgrade, where he could continue pursuing his interests. However, at that point, electronic music in Yugoslavia was lagging at least a decade behind electronic music trends in the West. Further, Radovanović’s style of dense polyphony – hyperpolyphony – which he had been developing since 1960 and debuted in 1964 with his radiophonic work Sferoön, was not an entirely new or innovative idea; it was similar in aesthetic to Ligeti’s and Lutosławski’s sound mass compositions from years prior.Footnote ⁴⁷

Other avant-gardists working in Belgrade were either writing in a subdued form of moderated modernism or they imitated the styles they had encountered at the Biennale. For instance, Maksimović’s Three Haiku features similar instrumentation, notation, and aleatoric techniques to those he heard in Lutosławski’s Trois poèmes d’Henri Michaux at the 1963 MBZ. Maksimović analyzed how the Polish composer used aleatoric techniques effectively, which influenced his own approach: first, aleatory freed the performers from the constraints of technical challenges; second, it opened up the possibilities for achieving richer polyrhythmic textures; and third, it made each performance of the work sound different.Footnote ⁴⁸ Further, Lutosławski developed several distinct notational markings for his techniques, such as down-arrows, which are also evident in Maksimović’s score. He also adapted and implemented notational aspects by other Polish composers into his score, such as Serocki’s beamed accelerando and ritardando markings, Penderecki’s style of denoting the highest possible sounds, and a general Polish School style of music organized not metrically but durationally by time segments and featuring aleatory musical motives, as Iwona Lindstedt illustrates (Example 3.1).Footnote ⁴⁹

Example 3.1

Rajko Maksimović, Three Haiku, I. On the Sandy Beach (1967), depicting aleatoric techniques, two measures before section E.

Other Yugoslav composers explored a combination of the Polish School techniques, namely aleatory, which they also combined with Messiaen’s modes, basic serial techniques, and chordal clusters, as well as Stravinsky-style polychords to try to create their “distinct” style of modernist expression. For instance, the music of Ozgijan, among other Belgrade-based composers during the 1960s, illustrates this approach. His Meditations for two pianos, strings, and percussion (1962) exemplifies techniques that are illustrative of the kind of modernist aesthetic practiced in Belgrade during this period. The work is primarily structured on two distinct hexachords that the composer uses in all four basic forms (prime, inversion, retrograde, and retrograde inversion) and combines to achieve the chromatic aggregate, but not in a strict or consistent serial manner. In addition to the quasi-serial treatment of the two hexachords, Ozgijan also uses a variety of modes, including octatonic collections and even tonal passages, alongside dissonant polychords that often repeat in an irregular rhythmic pattern and hence evoke both Stravinsky and Bartók.

The first generation of Croatian avant-garde composers – Milo Cipra (1906–1985), Natko Devčić (1914–1997), and Branimir Sakač (1918–1979) – employed the full array of avant-garde tools that were known in Yugoslavia at the time. For instance, Devčić relied on atonality and athematicism in his piano work Mikrosuite (1965), dodecaphony in a chamber piece Odrazi [Reflections] (1965), and electronics in Columbia 68 (1968). Sakač used concrete music in Tri sintetske poeme [Three synthetic poems] (1959), concrete and electronic sounds in Jahači Apokalipse [The riders of the Apocalypse] (1961), and a combination of serialism, aleatory, clusters, and graphic notation in works such as Prizme [Prisms] for piano (1961), Epizode [Episodes] for orchestra, and Strukture I [Structures I] for chamber ensemble (1966). Explorations of avant-garde methods continued with the next generation of Croatian composers, such as Kelemen, Malec, Ruben Radica (1931–2021), and Dubravko Detoni. Radica and Kelemen worked with serialism, and the latter even combined folk material within the method, as in his Pet eseja [Five essays] for string quartet (1959). Malec implemented aleatory methods, using both improvisational and strictly composed passages. However, he is most notable in the domain of electronic music, as discussed in later chapters.Footnote ⁵⁰ Detoni, the foremost Croatian avant-gardist, explored the notions of sound and noise (as in his work Likovi i plohe [Figures and planes] for orchestra [1967]), improvisation and graphic notation (as in Šifre [Codes] for piano and four loudspeakers [1967]), and electronic and concrete music (such as Phonomorphia 1–4 [1967–1974]).Footnote ⁵¹

In Slovenia, composers like Primož Ramovš (1921–1999) and Lojze Lebič (b. 1934) also worked with aleatorics, but it was Globokar who brought radical avant-garde improvisation to Yugoslavia as a “composing cornerstone” and means of communication in contemporary music.Footnote ⁵² Generally speaking, music created during the 1960s indicates that Yugoslav composers explored all of the techniques they had heard at the Biennale, such as the use of clusters, texturally dense sound masses, aleatory, use of electronics, and even, to an extent, serialism and integral serialism. On the one hand, this experimentation is indicative of the Yugoslav composers’ affinity toward the new, which was strengthening with each subsequent edition of the Biennale. On the other hand, collectively, Yugoslav modernist expression was quite mild, and it lacked originality. That is, the result was an attempt at inserting something that had already existed, in some cases almost like a patchwork of many different styles and techniques, while trying to frame these aesthetics and techniques as authentic. Hence, their music was hardly ever discerned as original or new outside of Yugoslavia, and often not even within the country. The one composer whom the critics from abroad typically praised as noteworthy was Kelemen – the founder, director, and organizer of the festival – which is hard to comprehend in any other way than just out of courtesy.

It would take a few years before a composer of Yugoslav heritage would truly catch everyone’s attention and gain critical acclaim, especially in Europe: Vinko Globokar. Although Globokar’s first appearance at the Zagreb Biennale was in 1967, the young composer and trombonist was already known in the prominent avant-garde circles in Europe. He premiered works by many notable figures, such as Berio (whose Sequenza V for solo trombone Globokar premiered at Carnegie Hall in 1966), Stockhausen (in whose group Globokar played during his time in Cologne), Leibowitz, Kagel, and Tōru Takemitsu, alongside his own. Globokar’s experimental style (both in his performances and compositions) was imbued with extended techniques and unconventionality, improvisation, theatricality, and elements of avant-garde, free jazz, and Yugoslav idioms, which was striking, innovative, creative, and, at the time, unique (Figure 3.1).

Figure 3.1

Vinko Globokar performing at the Music Biennale Zagreb, May 8–14, 1977 (Music Biennale Zagreb Archive).

While Miloš Petrović’s marriage of Byzantine and jazz style would emerge (in Serbia) in the early 1980s,Footnote ⁵³ Globokar’s style of combining avant-garde, jazz, and Yugoslav folk idioms was well known outside of Yugoslavia (especially in Germany and France) a decade or more earlier. For instance, motives in his Études pour folklora I and II (1969) are derived from Globokar’s memories of the traditional music from Macedonia and Bosnia and Herzegovina – not so much the actual music, but musical gestures, choreography, and improvisation, as he explains:

It was Globokar’s refusal to “pit avant-garde claims of one (contemporary music) against the other (free jazz)” that allowed him to carve a distinct, unique, and genre-defying path, as Jonathan Goldman posits.Footnote ⁵⁵ Globokar, along with just a handful of other composers, stands out as a truly experimental avant-gardist who pushed the boundaries of expression and innovation. Such a radical departure from convention was not fully accepted in Yugoslavia at this time, a country that was predominantly guided by convention and moderation of modernism. However, the advances of the 1960s prepared the stage for the extraordinary avant-garde movements that would emerge in Yugoslavia in the 1970s and 1980s.

Conclusion

The founding of the MBZ was arguably the most significant cultural event in Yugoslavia of the 1960s. With the adaptation of socialist realism immediately after the war and a push for an audience-friendly musical aesthetic throughout the 1950s, the period when the exchange of information or travel outside the communist country was practically impossible, the Biennale could not have happened any earlier than it did. Kelemen’s vision for such a festival of new music was born in the right place and at the right time. By 1960, Yugoslavia was starting to open to the West economically, politically, and culturally, and the relationship with the Eastern Bloc was being repaired. Artists from abroad were intrigued by the country’s unique political position of not belonging to either bloc. In his review of the inaugural festival for the New York Times, Helm noted that “it was not by chance that this festival took place in Yugoslavia, for along with Poland, Yugoslavia is the most open-minded of the Communist countries in artistic matters.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Schuller expanded on this notion in his review of the second installment of the event: “Because of the special ambivalent position of Yugoslavia in the ideological struggle between East and West, the Zagreb Music Biennale is perhaps the only contemporary music festival where the opposing camps can confront each other artistically, at least in theory, on an equal footing.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Thus, the Zagreb Biennale put Yugoslavia on the (cultural) map and made the nation one of the most essential points where East and West could meet.

For Yugoslav composers, such weighty international attention was a major turning point. While, for some, hearing the avant-garde trends resulted in crises, for many, it opened a whole new world of possibilities. Composers of all generations and from across the region tried finding different ways to modernize their music. A select few were able to learn the newest techniques at Darmstadt or the electronic music studios across Europe and the US. However, for an overwhelming majority, these explorations were done on their own and without any support from their peers, professors, or institutions, who were still promoting traditional aesthetics and tolerated modernism only in small doses. This resistance to the new by the powerful few is the reason why, overall, the modernist aesthetic in Yugoslavia lagged behind other countries. It is not necessarily that composers themselves lacked the capacity for innovation, as Dibelius suggested; the country lacked such capacity because it was strongly asserting limitations on what level of modernism was acceptable and tolerated by the institutions, critics, and composers who held power.

The formation of the Third Program of Radio Belgrade in 1965 played a significant role in the accessibility and dissemination of modern and experimental music in Yugoslavia. Modeled after similar “third programs” of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) in London and the Westdeutscher Rundfunk in Cologne, the Belgrade station was structured around the promotion of new music through broadcasts, organization of concerts with ensembles (mostly from abroad) that specialized in new music, and panel discussions organized by a notable critic and philosopher, Pavle Stefanović. As Ivana Medić presents in her study of the history of the Third Program, the creation of the station, regarded as an “island of free expression,”Footnote ⁵⁸ was a crucial factor in the modernization of Yugoslav music and the development of critical and theoretical thought.Footnote ⁵⁹ It eventually led to the founding of the first electronic music studio in the nation (and the Balkan region) in 1972.

Because of the Zagreb Biennale’s close interrelation with other arts from its inaugural meeting – the festival also featured other artistic events and exhibitions – the proliferation of new art was thriving. Three months after the Biennale, Zagreb hosted the vibrant “New Tendencies” International Art Movement in August 1961, which brought together twenty-eight contemporary visual artists and architects from Italy, France, Germany, Switzerland, Argentina, and Venezuela, three of whom were from Croatia (Ivan Picelj, Vjenceslav Richter, and Julije Knifer).Footnote ⁶⁰ Other institutions dedicated to the promotion of new arts in Yugoslavia flourished: The Museum of Contemporary Art opened in Belgrade in 1965 (although some of its activities began in 1958), the Belgrade International Theater Festival (BITEF) in 1967, and the Belgrade Music Festival (BEMUS) in 1969.

Another festival of new music – the Review of Yugoslav Music (Tribina muzičkog stvaralaštva Jugoslavije) – was founded in Opatija, Croatia, in 1963. Since the Biennale had quickly become the prime scene for the most revered “superstars” from abroad, the inclusion of Yugoslav composers in the festival was quite competitive and difficult. Even among Yugoslav composers presented at the Biennale, critics from other republics immediately noted that the festival organizers disproportionately featured composers from Croatia and Slovenia, while the presence of Serbian composers was scarce. Hence, the festival in Opatija was founded as a venue where composers from all six republics were programmed in accordance with the values of socialist Yugoslavia, and it subsequently became the most significant national event for Yugoslav composers.Footnote ⁶¹

Despite numerous political challenges – traditionalists holding on steadfastly to their power and obstructing development, the Communist Party’s behind-the-scenes propagation of traditional ideals, and the criticism and bickering among composers and festival organizers arising from nationalism, including disagreements about which ethnicities were disproportionately programmed at the Biennale – nonetheless it was clear that by 1960 Yugoslavia was on a steady route to progress and modernization. Perhaps these earliest attempts to catch up with the West (and East) were trivial compared to the advances made in other countries, but Music Biennale Zagreb turned Yugoslavia into a center of exchange of contemporary art in the 1960s and set the stage for its remarkable new avant-gardes that were to emerge only a few years later.