Sacred Music as a Subversive Force in Socialist Yugoslavia

The Communist Party of Yugoslavia that had organised the partisan army to fight against the German Nazi forces as occupiers in World War II was well prepared for establishing its one-party system after the war. In March 1945, the Central Committee of the Party of Yugoslavia decided that control over culture in the new state should be institutionalised and very promptly a department for propaganda (Agitprop) was founded within that highest political body. The Union of Serbian Composers followed the general line of disciplining creative artists and in one of its typical statements it recommended that its members should “develop and help the fight against influences of idealistic conceptions, decadency and the vulgarisation of music”. After the conflict and break with the USSR in 1948 and the resulting rapprochement of Yugoslavia to Western countries, the conditions for a more liberal cultural climate were gradually built, enabling thus a quicker development in the direction of contemporary Western compositional trends. Criticism of modernism, decadence, and experimentalism observed in some of the newly composed music lasted for some time more, finally calming down after 1960. However, censorship subsisted in Yugoslavia for longer, but outside strictly art music: the church music sphere was always perceived as belonging to oppositional and enemy activities. In the article are examined the attitudes of the cultural officials both towards performing sacred music composed in the past, and the use of church melodies in new works.