Page 361 - Weiss, Jernej, ur./ed. 2026 Skladateljska društva nekoč in danes.../Composers’ Societies Past and Present...

Summaries
creativity abroad. The ensemble gave almost 170 concerts, made 140 record-
ings for national and international radio stations and appeared in nearly 40
television broadcasts. It also premiered 65 works by nineteen Slovene com-
posers, with 40 of these premiere performances taking place abroad and 25
in Slovenia. More than 110 performers passed through the ensemble’s ranks
during its initial two decades of activity. Petrić was for the most part able to
bring together excellent musicians, with whom he achieved concert perfor-
mances of a high level of quality, as demonstrated by the numerous reviews
published in domestic and foreign media. The paper focuses primarily on
the ensemble’s performances abroad, while also highlighting certain events
that marked the concurrent activities of the Society of Slovene Composers.
Keywords: Slavko Osterc Ensemble, Ivo Petrić, premiere
performances, abroad, promotion

Ingeborg Zechner
How Music Works: Film Composers, Labour, and the Screen Composers Association
in Mid-Twentieth-Century America
Film music composition emerged as one of the most prolific domains of
musical creation in twentieth-century America. Beyond offering vast pro-
fessional opportunities, Hollywood film music occupied a unique aes-
thetic and institutional position: situated between popular and art music,
it was shaped by the medium of film and received ambivalent receptions
from audiences and scholars alike. In the 1940s and 1950s, Hollywood com-
posers habitually undertook diverse musical tasks – composing, arrang-
ing, conducting – within a highly industrialised division of labour that
lacked a comprehensive legal framework. While actors, directors, and writ-
ers formed powerful guilds, the distinctive position of film composers,
caught between creative authorship and industrial labour, required a ded-
icated professional body. Founded in 1945, the Screen Composers Associa-
tion (SCA) sought to address this gap by supporting the specific profession-
al needs of film composers. Despite its significance, the SCA’s history has
received little scholarly attention. This article examines the SCA’s formative
years to illuminate the complex intersections of composition, labour, and
industry in Hollywood. Drawing on archival records of the SCA preserved
at the Margaret Herrick Library and related materials in US archives, I con-
textualise the society’s activities within the broader networks of film and
music organisations. This perspective highlights how composer societies
like the SCA collectively shaped the working lives of film composers, from

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