Description
In my life, communism fell when my grandfather, the Yugoslav People’s Army colonel Vlastimir Stojanović, the bearer of many medals, including three for bravery in his unwavering fight against fascism, one day placed a photograph of Philip Glass, hands on his forehead, into the frame where a picture of Marshal Josip Broz Tito had previously been standing for years. With that unexpected curatorial gesture, he paid tribute to the enthusiasm with which I was exploring Glass’s music and the music of other minimalist composers. Never before have I seen my grandfather allow anything to be elevated to the rank of the Marshal, who embodied his most sincere communist convictions. I was delighted, even though I didn’t yet understand that my private communism had, in that moment, been replaced by another ideology.Beginning my musicology studies in Belgrade in 1993, I was part of the first generation of students whose curriculum included Serbian, rather than Yugoslav, music history. In some way, this shift represented the divide left by the Fall. I was neither a witness nor a historian of the Fall in any formal sense; I simply lived through it. In my paper, I propose an authoteoretical analysis of what it meant and entailed to become a musicologist in the sociological and cultural turmoil in post-Communist Serbia. Theoretical, musical, and personal moments that shaped my musicological becoming are turned into footnotes that reveal a formation born out of the disintegration of one world.
| Period | 29 May 2026 |
|---|---|
| Event title | 1991: The Fall of Communism and Its Impact on Music and the Arts |
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | Belgrade, SerbiaShow on map |
| Degree of Recognition | International |