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The Sarajevo Period of Dane Škerl’s Artistic Activity
with an early expressionism and signs of broken tonality. The third stylistic
trend shows an interest in more modernistic, and even avant-garde proce-
dures consistent with contemporary European music.
It is quite certain that the frictions among these three trends, based on
different ideological tendencies created by the composers gathered in the
Association of Composers of Bosnia and Herzegovina as an umbrella in-
stitution, and especially those employed at the Academy of Music, encour-
aged and strengthened the polemic about the (r)evolutionary impulse in
the art of music. In this context, Dane Škerl strongly advocated for a kind
of “middle path” between the avant-garde tendencies European compos-
ers were dealing with and the self-sufficient modes of traditional musical
language, confirming his attitude about those tendencies in conversations
with his colleagues:
I accept Bartók’s thesis that ‘there is no revolution in music’. Each of the
modern classics created – regardless of the style they used – a series of
works that represent outstanding contribution to the world music. The
so-called ‘avant-garde’ have so far proven themselves to be very capable
salesmen of systems that change every day and are obsolete tomorrow.
The means have become the end. For me, that is not avant-garde, with a
29
few exceptions, such as the Polish master Penderecki.
This kind of manoeuvring, typical of many composers of the time –
and not only in Bosnia and Herzegovina, but also in other countries of for-
mer Yugoslavia – was often stated as neoclassical, as the Slovenian musicol-
ogist Gregor Pompe notes:
Neoclassicism offered itself as a logical choice not only because of its
social ‘suitability’, but because it seemed to stand at the midpoint be-
tween the Romantic traditional over-emotionality of Škerjanc and Os-
terc’s objectivised commitment to everything new; it seemed to offer an
opportunity for evasion, which, at the same time, was not extreme. It
is interesting to note that, in the early 1950s, four composers (Lipovšek
and Ramovš from Osterc’s school, and Krek and Škerl from Škerjanc’s
school) wrote Neoclassical pieces whose artificial perfection exceeds
that of their teacher’s works, although they do not solve the dilemmas
30
already troubling their Western European counterparts at the time.

29 Reich, Susreti sa suvremenim kompozitorima Jugoslavije, 333.
30 Gregor Pompe, “Slovenian Music in the First Decade after the Second World War –
In Search of Socialist Realism,” Musicological Annual LIV, no. 2 (2018): 200.

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