The Modernist Identity of Compositional Practice in 1960s Belgrade: Petar Osghian’s Meditations (1962), Silhouettes (1963), and Sigogis (1967)

Abstract

In order to focus our attention on compositional practices in 1960s Belgrade, it is necessary to point out that these practices developed in tandem with the latest modernist trends in European music. Serbian musical modernism after the Second World War bore the imprint of a special, original, and autonomous artistic achievement. In that sense, Petar Osghian was one of the composers who created their works using avant-garde techniques, while insisting that their musical language should retain direct expressive and communicative functions. These composers made choices that would emerge logically from the latent possibilities of the materials they worked with, but in doing so they constantly tried to rise to the level of the most advanced compositional practices of the time. In other words, they used a given musical material as a point of departure for structural manipulations and for a wide variety of possible modifications in the construction of a musical work. The result was a harmonious relationship between rationally defined structural elements and ‘irrational’ gestures in shaping their processes; both were of equal importance. This paper discusses this relationship through the analysis of Petar Osghian’s orchestral trilogy—Meditations, Silhouettes, and Sigogis.