Page 29 - 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
marked conditions within the microcosm of the Union of Composers of
Yugoslavia.
The period is considered the most difficult in the Society’s history to
date, since as a result of changed economic, political and social conditions
it found itself in a vortex of changes that greatly affected the content and
scope of its activities. Self-management and the delegate system were hard-
ly tailored to satisfy professional interests, particularly when combined
with a financial crisis and a significant deterioration in relations among
the constituent nations of Yugoslavia. At the same time, the composer’s art,
with the expressive means at its disposal, was not a convenient “poem to
use today” (to quote the well-known poem by Oton Župančič), and this is
probably the reason why, in the whirlwind of turbulent social movements
in which the writers’ association played an important state-building role,
the composers’ society stood somewhat to the side.
It could be said of this period that the Society’s activities survived in
it despite the pressures from the wider social environment and conditions
in the Union of Composers of Yugoslavia, where executive board chair-
man Dane Škerl was faced with a paralysis of the activities of the profes-
sional service as a result of the distorted application of the delegate system
amid growing interethnic tensions. Škerl would later recall that in that pe-
riod there was a lot of talk but little action in the Union.
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The space for international cooperation had also narrowed. Slovene
composers took less and less advantage of the opportunities for exchang-
es offered by the Union, while they themselves had not yet established any
more prominent international cooperation.
The Society began to sink into financial crisis in this period. This was
partly caused by the inadequate funding of its core activities, with the Soci-
ety only receiving a third of the necessary funds from the republic’s budget,
and further exacerbated by the additional costs of expanding the Society’s
premises and renovating the ground floor of the building, where it planned
to open a sheet music shop in conjunction with Državna založba Slovenije.
A third reason was the temporary halt in the publishing arm’s international
operations as a result of ownership changes at its Western partners. The sit-
uation deteriorated to the extent that the Society was forced to ask the Un-
ion for an advance on copyright royalties, without which it would not have
been able to pay employees’ salaries or cover ongoing expenses.

23 Minutes of the General Assembly of the Slovene Composers’ Society, held on 16
March 1977, DSS Archive.

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