Page 21 - Weiss, Jernej, ur./ed. 2026 Skladateljska društva nekoč in danes.../Composers’ Societies Past and Present...

The Coexistence of the Social, the Professional and the Artistic
Briški, was set up under the Society’s aegis in 1947, in accordance with the
provisions of the Copyright Act. It is no surprise that, of all the profession-
al organisations in the republic, it was Slovenia’s composers who were first
to take steps to protect copyright, given that they were able to build on the
experiences of the pre-war UJMA, of which the majority of the newly estab-
lished Society’s members had been part. In his role as president of the re-
public institute, the composer Karol Pahor worked diligently to ensure that
legislative provisions were implemented in practice. He also managed to se-
cure the cooperation of the professional associations of writers, visual art-
ists, musicians and dramatic artists.
With the establishment of the Union of Composers of Yugoslavia in
1950, the circumstances were right for the transfer of copyright protec-
tion from the state to composers’ unions and associations. The Society of
Composers of Slovenia joined the Union a year later under its new pres-
ident Matija Bravničar, who would later also head the Union, and with a
new name – having renamed itself the Society of Slovene Composers (DSS)
in line with the rules. The Society participated actively in establishing the
Copyright Protection Institute under the Union’s aegis. 5
The process of setting up the activities of the new institute brought
considerable challenges, in part linked to questions of the decentralisation
of the distribution of resources among the republics and among individual
societies of authors and composers, in part to questions of the internal or-
ganisation of the institute, and in part to changes in tax legislation, which
was unfavourable to authors and composers. Nevertheless, it may be as-
serted that in this first post-war decade the Society held far greater powers
and influence in the copyright field than at any point in its history to date,
and that despite the extraordinarily convoluted and ever-changing legisla-
tive framework, it managed to steer a course relatively skilfully between the
reefs of this complex and sensitive issue.
The newly founded Union of Composers of Yugoslavia also assumed
responsibility for the central planning of international cooperation, which
it initially established through reciprocal visits to composers’ associations
in Eastern European countries. These took place according to predeter-
mined quotas designed to ensure numerically balanced exchanges of rep-
resentatives of Yugoslav composers and international partners; these were
5 SAKOJ was officially approved by the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Federal Peo-
ple’s Republic of Yugoslavia in Decision VI, No. 26078, on 8 September 1951. DSS Ar-
chive, Registrar I, January 6–December 12, 1951, document no. 311, dated January 3,
1952.

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