Marinković, Miloš

New Sound

Serbian Academy of Science and Arts Digital Archive (DAIS)

Article received on February 29th 2020 Article accepted on June 5th 2020 UDC 78.071.1:929 Марић Љ.(049.32) MILOŠ MARINKOVIĆ*Junior Researcher, Institute of Musicology SASA  PhD student, Department of Musicology, Faculty of Music, University of Arts in BelgradeMelita Milin, Ljubica Marić: komponovanje kao graditeljski čin [Ljubica Marić: Composing as an Act of Creation], Belgrade: Institute of Musicology SASA, 2018, 479 pages, ISBN 978-86-80639-38-31The newly founded award of the Serbian Musicological Society, “Stana Đurić--Klajn”, for a significant contribution to Serbian musicology in the year 2019, was * The author’s contact details:  marinkovic92milos@gmail.com 1 This review was written as part of  engage-ment at the Institute of Musicology SASA, funded by the Ministry of Education, Science and Technological Development of the Re-public of Serbia.given to Dr Melita Milin, a musicologist and principal research fellow of the Insti-tute of Musicology SASA, for the book Ljubica Marić: Composing as an Act of Creation. A number of articles published in reputable journals, a publication dedi-cated to the centenary of Ljubica Marić’s birth2 and a few other activities concern-ing the promotion and affirmation of the composer’s work speak volumes about Dr Melita Milin’s long-lasting interest in the creative work of Ljubica Marić. As a re-sult of fusion of Dr Milin’s previous works, completed and enriched with her latest research, thoughts and conclusions, she wrote the monograph Ljubica Marić: Composing as an Act of Creation which was then published by the Institute of Musicology of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts (2018).The fact that this research is based on unprocessed archived data (the legacy of Ljubica Marić and many other files) kept in the SASA Archives, the Archive of the Institute of Musicology SASA, the Ar-chives of Yugoslavia, the Archive of Ser-bia, and the Faculty of Music, proves its extraordinary value. The author gathered 2 Мелита Милин, Љубица Марић, 1909–2003: “... тајна – тишина – творење...”, Бео-град, САНУ/Службени гласник, 2009.239REVIEWS New Sound 55, I /2020240many important pieces of information from a number of contacts and archive groups outside of Serbia. In addition to that, the long-term friendship between Dr Melita Milin and Ljubica Marić was also, in a way, incorporated into the monograph, which gives it special impor-tance. In this monograph, the author crosses the borders of musicology by in-cluding the socio-political, cultural and artistic context while exploring the versa-tile activities of Ljubica Marić (she did not only compose, but was also perform-ing, conducting, educating, organizing and was even engaged in literary, visual art and philosophical activities) and giv-ing a valuable scientific contribution to the entire realm of national humanities.The research is divided into two major parts – The Lifetime of Ljubica Marić: A Need for the Act of Creation and Crossings – comprising a few smaller chapters. Apart from the number of music sheet examples, which illustrate analytical segments of the text, the mono-graph has a lot of appendices (which takes up almost a hundred pages). The first group of appendices contains corre-spondence, documents and literary texts incorporated by the composer into some of her works. The second group contains facsimiles of handwritten compositions, letters, poems, reproductions of paintings and pages from Marić’s copy of Octoëchos by Stevan Stojanović Mokranjac. To-gether with photographs, among which there are some from the composer’s childhood, the following additional ma-terial is of great value: A Timeline of Im-portant Moments in Ljubica Marić’s Life, A List of Compositions by Ljubica Marić (with additional information about every printed and recorded music piece, liter-ary works and also about her lost or de-stroyed compositions), as well as Bibliog-raphy of Writings about Ljubica Marić (ranging from the most simple articles to monographic research). As a conclusion, the book is complemented with a detailed index of names, the author’s biography in two languages and a summary written in English.After an explication of her method-ology, the author, in the introduction of the book, concisely presents Ljubica Marić’s opus, which consists of five stages of creation (first stage: 1928–1944, sec-ond stage: 1945–1951, third stage: 1956–1967, fourth stage: 1967–1983, fifth stage: 1983–1996). As Dr Milin said herself, she wanted to connect every part of Marić’s life and creation, so she “[...] made chronological notes about the events which were essential for the composer’s artistic development and which affected her career, including intermittently re-views of her compositions and other works of art”.3First part, The Lifetime of Ljubica Marić: A Need for the Act of Creation, consists of the following facts: the com-poser’s family tree, her childhood in Kra-gujevac, Belgrade and Valjevo, school time in the Music School in Belgrade, studies at the Prague Conservatory, trav-els and specialization in Berlin, Amster-dam and Strasbourg, return to Belgrade, life in Zagreb, another trip to Prague and, finally, return and employment in Bel-grade.3 Мелита Милин, Љубица Марић: компо-новање као градитељски чин, Београд, Му-зиколошки институт САНУ, 2018, 17.Reviews241Through these chapters, it is easy to follow the artistic development of Ljubica Marić. The author, who is an expert in the musical and cultural happenings of the 20th century, considered every envi-ronment in which the composer had spent a certain period of time. There are a lot of outstanding individuals who greatly influenced the professional growth of Ljubica Marić, starting with Miloje Milojević and Josip Slavenski in Belgrade and then Josef Suk and Alois Hába in Prague. In the part of the book which tells us about the composer’s years in Prague, the author observes her biography through the prism of modernist tenden-cies in this city during the 1930s, taking into consideration other Serbian compos-ers, members of the famous Prague group. Special attention was paid to some key events in Marić’s life, which played a great part in her affirmation, such as, for example, the performance of the Wind quintet at the Festival of the International Society for Contemporary Music in Am-sterdam (1933). The chapters about the first decades of Marić’s life are completed with meticulous analytical segments. The author constantly emphasises the mod-ernist orientation of Ljubica Marić, which began forming during her studies, by giv-ing thorough and vivid analyses of her early works, such as Sorrow for the Girl (for a men’s choir), Sonata Fantasia (for a violin solo), String Quartet, Wind Quin-tet, Music for Orchestra and Sketches for Piano. The subsequent chapters are focused on the composer’s life and work in Bel-grade. After the analysis of compositions in which Dr Melita Milin emphasises a change in Ljubica Marić’s style, the change being a decrease of modernist ex-pression (Water Flowed, Three Preludes and Etude, Branko’s Round Dance, Chil-dren’s music, Three Folk Songs, Verses from ‘The Mountain Wreath’, Sonata for violin and piano), the reader will encoun-ter a period which was, in the writer’s opinion, the peak of Ljubica Marić’s cre-ative energy (1956–1967) and in that pe-riod, she wrote the following pieces: Songs of Space, Passacaglia, The Music of Octoïch, Octoïcha 1, Byzantine Concerto, The Threshold of Dream, Ostinato super thema Octoïcha, The Enchantress, Word of Light, Lament, Pastoral and Hymn. A pre-cise and clearly substantiated analytical discourse proves the author’s great com-petence, dedication, careful and thor-ough approach to the formal and tonal and thematic aspect of these composi-tions. The writer tried to keep track of the genesis of the mentioned composi-tions and, at the same time, describe Lju-bica Marić’s passion for medieval Byzan-tine culture, the complexity of her attitude towards the Serbian Octoëchos and possible influences of other compos-ers on Marić’s opus.Since Ljubica Marić ‘retreated’ for a while (from 1967 to 1983, she only wrote Song for the Flute) the author’s focus then turns towards some social aspects of the composer’s life, which attest great respect for Ljubica Marić by the intellectuals of that era. Engagement with the Biennale of Contemporary Music in Zagreb, the selection of Ljubica Marić as a corre-sponding member of the Serbian Acad-emy of Sciences and Arts and a number of meetings, conversations and travels of the composer and her acquaintances are described further. The reader learns New Sound 55, I /2020242about the composer’s interest in broad-casting and also with her less famous works and her great talent in poetry and visual arts.The last segment of this detailed part is dedicated to the composer’s late (fifth) stage of creation and the following pieces are analysed: Invocation, From the Darkness Chanting, Monodia Octoïcha, Asymptote, The Wondrous Milligram, Ar-chaia, Archaia 2, Torso, Harmony in Stone. Since Ljubica Marić was still in-spired by the Octoëchos in her late stage of creation, Dr Melita Milin achieved continuity with the prior chapter with her analytical approach, pointing out the characteristics of the composer’s subse-quent approach towards the Octoëchos’s melodies compared with the approach from her third stage of creation. The modernist poetics of Ljubica Marić were always highlighted in detailed analyses of musical language, but segments from both national and foreign newspaper re-views are also very important to under-stand every piece mentioned, because the reader learns about the reception of these pieces at the time they were produced and performed for the first time.The second part of the monograph is called Crossings. In four chapters, the au-thor writes about essential aspects that prevail in the poetics of Ljubica Marić. The chapter Both Serbia and Byzantium as Motherlands is about the composer’s specific experience of Byzantine heritage and provides a broader context of interest in Byzantine culture and art in this re-gion. The next chapter, Ljubica Marić and the Octoëchos is about the enormous in-fluence of this liturgical book on the cre-ation of Ljubica Marić, who was actually the first Serbian composer who used the Octoëchos chant in non-liturgical com-positions. The author, among other things, writes about Marić’s philosophical thoughts about time as a specific synthe-sis of crucial elements of the archaic and the present in the fourth chapter Time in Ljubica Marić’s Music: Depths of the Fourth Dimension, with references to Henri Bergson and Igor Stravinsky’s time categories. The last chapter Instead of a Conclusion: Fluid Borders of Modernism in Ljubica Marić’s Music is a summary of all five stages of creation of the composer, but with a succinct description of the es-sential features of the means of expres-sion typical of Ljubica Marić’s way of composing. At the end, the author poses questions about the potential interpreta-tion of Ljubica Marić’s later pieces of work in the context of postmodernism (or, to be more precise, modernism which is open for postmodernist ideas), as well as her possible influence on the ‘acts of creation’ of younger Serbian composers.With a clear articulation of her sci-entific mind and her recognizable, pleas-ant language, Dr Melita Milin offers to experts and other readers alike an abun-dance of hitherto unknown information about the life of Ljubica Marić and a unique interpretation of this artist’s opus, which does not consist only of musical works. Having almost 500 pages, the book Ljubica Marić: Composing as an Act of Creation is not just one of the most ex-tensive and detailed researches about Serbian composers, but also carries a his-torical value, since it is so far the biggest and most complex scientific contribution about the character and work of this clas-sic of Serbian contemporary music.

Melita Milin, Ljubica Marić: komponovanje kao graditeljski čin [Ljubica Marić: Composing as an Act of Creation], Belgrade: Institute of Musicology SASA, 2018.

https://dais.sanu.ac.rs/bitstream/123456789/9447/1/bitstream_39487.pdf

Melita Milin, Ljubica Marić: komponovanje kao graditeljski čin [Ljubica Marić: Composing as an Act of Creation], Belgrade: Institute of Musicology SASA, 2018.

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

Serbian Academy of Science and Arts Digital Archive (DAIS)