Building a Personal Artistic Identity as a Tribute to One’s ‘Heroes’: Vlastimir Trajković’s ‘Le Tombeau de la Bonne Musique’

In this article, I analyse the creative opus by the Serbian composer and academician Vlastimir Trajković (1947–2017) through the lens of his ‘tributes’ to several of his favourite composers and musicologists, including Maurice Ravel, Claude Debussy, Olivier Messiaen, and Manuel de Falla. However, Trajković also made a conscious effort to include at least two Serbian musical figures in this ‘Pantheon’ of greats: his own grandfather, Miloje Milojević (1884–1946), whose modernist and decidedly ‘antiromantic’ style, strongly influenced by impressionism, had a profound impact on Trajković’s own stylistic choices, and Dragutin Gostuški (1923–1998), whose seminal book Vreme umetnosti [The Time of Art] influenced Trajković’s entire poetics. I argue that Trajković built his own artistic identity with the ultimate goal of honouring his ‘heroes’, while also aiming to broaden the affirmation and acknowledgment of Serbian art music, recognising it as a constitutive element of European musical legacy.