International musicological conference Modernism in East and West: Contrasts, Intersections and Parallels
University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Arts, November 27–29, 2024
Organizers:
Department of Musicology, Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana
UHO Society as part of the New Music Forum 2024
Slovenian Musicological Society
Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences
The Department of Musicology of the Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana, is organizing an international musicological conference entitled “Modernism in the East and West: Contrasts, Intersections and Parallels”, which will be held in Ljubljana from 27 to 29 November 2024 as part of the festival New Music Forum. The conference will be dedicated to the 90th birthday of composers Vinko Globokar and Lojze Lebič.
In 2024, the important Slovenian composers Lojze Lebič and Vinko Globokar will celebrate their 90th birthdays. In addition to their year of birth, both composers also share a commitment to the radical aesthetics of post-war modernism. Although they each implement these aesthetics very specific ways, in many respects their solutions seem to be linked to a different acceptance of the modernist tradition. While Globokar encountered the modernist tradition in the “first person” in Paris and Berlin as part of a broader modernist context (he was a student of René Leibowitz and Lucian Berio, a lecturer at the Musikhochschule in Cologne, the head of the Department for Instrumental and Vocal Research at IRCAM and a member of the improvisation group New Phonic Art), Lebič (who was a conductor of the RTV Slovenia Mixed Choir and a professor at the Faculty of Education and the Faculty of Arts in Ljubljana) remained in Slovenia most of the time and absorbed the influences of modernism “second hand”, mainly through visits to the Warsaw Autumn Festival and the Zagreb Biennale. Neither composer accepts modernist influences without reservation: Globokar opposes modernist Larpurlartism and derives his ideas from social conflicts, while Lebič does not trust the universalism of modernism and prefers to refer to the local, the mystical and the historical. Thus, they create their own characteristic modernist worlds, which give the impression that modernism, despite its universalist utopia, is nevertheless essentially more regionally coloured. This attitude brings Globokar to the edge of conceptually grounded sociocritical art, while Lebič flirts with forms of postmodernism.
The conference will attempt to place the dichotomy revealed by the comparison of the two composers in the context of differences in the perception and implementation of modernist ideas in the European East and West. Rather than being a geographical divide, this is understood primarily as a socio-political divide through which the whole of Europe was caught up in a global conflict between the two superpowers, the United States of America and the Soviet Union, and thus between capitalist logic and socialist dogmatism. The post-war feeling of a new beginning, the experience of “Year Zero” (U. Dibelius, R. P. Morgan, H. Danuser) triggered waves of modernist divergence, manifested in a seemingly global effort to eschew functionalism and achieve artistic liberation from both the National Socialist burden and the social-realist shackles. At the same time, concrete solutions were sought under the conditions of various cultural policies, which often depended on narrower, even local conditions. In the general discourse, the “freedom” of the Western world is often emphasised in contrast to the political and cultural oppression in the East, which, however, was not equally strong and successful in all countries. Fundamental consideration should therefore be devoted to questions of the extent to which modernism on both sides of the Iron Curtain followed parallel paths after 1945, the number of common features and solutions, the various specific poetics, how influences passed from one side to the other, and what all of this meant for music after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and thus for today’s pluralistic musical practice.
Organising committee:
- Prof. Dr Matjaž Barbo
- Doc. Dr Katarina Bogunović Hočevar
- Dr Vesna Venišnik Peternelj
- Prof. Dr Gregor Pompe
Programme Committee:
- Prof. Dr Matjaž Barbo
- Dr Sabine Beck
- Prof. Dr Dalibor Davidović
- Prof. Dr Jörn Peter Hiekel
- Prof. Dr Tijana Popović Mlađenović
- Prof. Dr Gregor Pompe
- Prof. Dr Leon Stefanija
- Prof. Dr Lubomír Spurný