Constituting Neoclassicism in Serbia or: How and Why Neoclassicism Can Be Understood as Modernism – a Study of Ristić’s Second Symphony

Abstract

The paper examines the possible re-contextualization of the Serbian musical neoclassicism in the field of (sober) modernism/socialist aestheticism characteristic for Serbian art and literature of the fifties. From that perspective, the Second Symphony (1951) by Milan Ristić is seen as the constitutive piece of neoclassicism/sober modernism, i.e. of artistic tendency that is going to become very important for understanding Serbian music in the second half of the 20th century.