Legal Aliens: Serbian Composers in Western Europe Today

This article is an extract from my ongoing investigation of the destinies of Serbian composers who have emigrated since the early 1990s, a period that was marked by the dissolution of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and the ensuing wars when hundreds of thousands of professionals left the country and settled all over the world. Such a massive ‘brain drain’ has had a devastating impact on many professional realms in the entire former-Yugoslav region. Thus far, I have located more than seventy Serbian composers who currently live and work abroad, a significant number for such a small country. In this article, I focus on the professional and personal trajectories of several composers who have managed to establish successful careers in various Western European countries. A recent monograph by Elena Dubinets, Russian Composers Abroad: How They Left, Stayed, Returned (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2021), serves as my discoursive ‘counterpoint’.