A Draft of the Statute of the "Pro musica viva" Group as an Attempt to Determine Its Aesthetic Co-ordinates

Abstract

The development of the 'fifties' and 'sixties' in Slovene music was marked by the period of a political »thaw«, broadening of concert life, reviving of radio programmes, coming up of tape recordings and of gramophone records, emergence of new, significant music festivals and in this way of the possibility for a broad exchange of information in the area of free supply of current production. The extraordinary penetrating generation of young composers coming up on the Slovene musical scene at that time was bringing along a new aesthetics which was becoming a historically progressive exponent of the leading idea of the New in music. The most important composers of this young generation gathered in the PMV group of composers, and this label was soon to become the symbol of committment to the New music, of making Slovene music open to foreign influences, of becoming aware of modern compositional techniques and of the reviving of the Slovene modernist tradition of the 'thirties'. In aesthetic programmes it was presenting itself with characteristic »neo-avantgardist« patterns of rejecting »not-contemporary« creativity (which meant what did not identify itself with the aesthetic attitudes of New music), irrespective of the fact that otherwise in particular compositional realizations and in public concert performances it was in many a respect renewing basic patterns of traditional music and also of the fact that in aesthetic attitudes of its members it was anything but homogenous. The basic models of its activity are to be found in the Draft of the Statute of the group which was otherwise not accepted by the members as a binding authoritative basis for mutual cooperation and has in their historical memory for the most part already become lost, but which nevertheless represents a significant direct source of the fundamental aesthetic starting points for its members.