Page 16 - 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
musical institutions and related associations in the former Yugoslavia, in
Slovenia and in the international cultural sphere. The author outlines the
realisation of the Society’s mission by presenting specific initiatives in mu-
sic publishing and concert activities, in encouraging the creation of new
musical works, the distribution of sheet music, copyright protection and
international cooperation in individual periods of Yugoslav and Slovene
(cultural) policy. This is followed by papers from Hartmut Krones, one of
the leading experts on Viennese musical life, who addresses the topic of
cooperation and conflict between two sections of the Austrian Compos-
ers’ Society; Lubomír Spurný, the director of the Terezín Composers’ Insti-
tute, who defines the concept of “Terezín composer” and describes the role
of music in the extreme conditions of the Terezín ghetto between 1941 and
1945; our Ukrainian colleague Lidia Melnyk, who draws attention to the of-
ten ideologically coloured and frequently incomplete representation of the
activities of Ukrainian composers’ societies in the 1920s and 1930s; and one
of the most important Ukrainian musicologists working today, Luba Ky-
janovska which sheds light on the difficult period of the Lviv section of the
Ukrainian Composers’ Association in its conflict with Soviet ideology. The
international activities of composers’ organisations behind the Iron Cur-
tain, using the example of the Leipzig District Association of the Associa-
tion of Composers and Musicologists of the German Democratic Republic
(GDR), are discussed in an article by Helmut Loos, the long-serving former
head of the Leipzig Institute of Musicology. Ingeborg Zecher, a researcher
in the Department of Arts and Musicology at the University of Graz, de-
scribes the activities of the American Screen Composers Association in the
1940s and 1950s and British musicologist Joanna Bullivant sheds light on
the role of the former chairman of the Composers’ Guild of Great Britain,
Alan Bush, and his “unofficial diplomacy” in Eastern Europe.
In a series of articles examining the composers’ societies in the for-
mer Yugoslavia, Croatian researchers Lucija Konfic and Petra Babić ana-
lyse the role of composers in musical societies in continental Croatia in the
19th century. Macedonian historian and musicologist Nataša Didenko dis-
cusses the intertwining of the professional and the national in the Union of
composers’ of Macedonia in the past and present, while Serbian colleagues
Maja Vasiljević and Biljana Leković present numerous examples of musical
cooperation, exchange and transfer between members of the UKS, SAKOJ
and SOKOJ and Soviet institutions. The series of contributions from the
former Yugoslavia concludes with the article by Bosnian musicologists

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