Page 140 - Weiss, Jernej, ur./ed. 2026 Skladateljska društva nekoč in danes.../Composers’ Societies Past and Present...

Skladateljska društva nekoč in danes | Composers’ Societies Past and Present
on behalf of the British government – met the composer in more than one
3
location and lent Britten and Pears their car. Philip Reed has also noted the
role played by the British Council during the Japan leg of the tour, with an
instruction coming from the organisation’s Head Office to their then-rep-
resentative in Japan, Reginald Close, to find someone to sponsor a concert
4
to be given by Britten and Pears. 1955 was a timely moment for Britten to
visit Yugoslavia for other reasons too. It came at the end of the difficult peri-
od of Soviet-Yugoslav relations that culminated in the Belgrade Declaration
5
of that year, which normalised relations between the two countries. Tito
himself had visited the UK in March 1953, and in March 1955 sculptor Hen-
ry Moore had exhibited his work in Zagreb, Belgrade, Skopje and Ljubljana
in a tour that arose as a result of negotiations between the British Council
and the Yugoslav Embassy. As Sonja Kralj writes in this volume, the mid-
6
1950s also marked the point at which Yugoslav composers’ societies began
to open relations with the West. 7
In the mid-1950s, then, conditions were perfect for opening up previ-
ously frozen diplomatic channels between Britain and countries of Eastern
Europe and engaging in cultural exchange. Yet what of any earlier activi-
ties? Stewart Duncan has recently revealed an important earlier pedigree
for musical diplomacy in Eastern Europe. In the context of a desire to do
more to project British culture positively around the world in the 1930s, the
British Council sponsored two choral tours that took in cities of Eastern
Europe. In 1936 the New English Singers toured Vienna, Budapest, Brno,
Prague, Krakow and Warsaw, and in 1938 the Fleet Street Choir of Lon-
don visited Prague, Zagreb, Belgrade, Sofia, Bucharest, Budapest, Krakow
and Warsaw, showcasing the excellence of the English choral tradition

3 Peter Pears and Philip Reed, The Travel Diaries of Peter Pears, 1936–1978 (Wood-
bridge: Boydell Press, 1995), 22.
4 Ibid., 57.
5 Želimir Koščević, “Henry Moore’s Exhibition in Yugoslavia, 1955,” in British Art
Studies: British Sculpture Abroad, 1945–2000, eds. Penelope Curtis and Marti-
na Droth (London and New Haven: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art
and Yale University Press, 2016), https://britishartstudies-03.netlify.app/issues/03
/moore-belgrade/.
6 Ibid.
7 Sonja Kralj, “The Coexistence of the Social, the Professional and the Artistic in the
History of the Society of Slovene Composers,” in Composers’ Societies Past and Pres-
ent: Combining the Professional and the National (= Studia musicologica Labacen-
sia 9), ed. Jernej Weiss (Koper, Ljubljana: Založba Univerze na Primorskem, Festival
Ljubljana, 2025), 19–37.

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