Skice za zgodovino slovenske glasbe 20. stoletja

Abstract

The publication of this book, described by its author as a “work in progress,” is an important landmark in the author’s quest for exploring his personal research process, whose origins can be traced back to the last years of the past century, and whose crown jewel is his monumental monograph published late last year that discusses the same time frame as this book. The author’s characterization of his work as “unfinished” is probably due to two reasons: in addition to trying to logically connect individual, narrowly focused studies into a whole, another reason might be the fact that it is difficult to treat the music of that period as monolithic. One of the characteristics of the twentieth century is that it is multifaceted, with personal styles and coexisting trends that greatly differ in their attitudes. Gregor Pompe pursues the goal of covering an entire range of creative choices, which is quite an arduous task given the rapid changes in stylistic features and introduction of perpetually new compositional techniques. Each “sketch”, each article on a chosen aspect of a certain composer’s work, can be seen as a piece of the mosaic that depicts the most common features of the musical twentieth century in Slovenia, which was rich and diverse, but also marked by distinctive breaks. It is thus not just a collection of mostly unpublished texts in Slovenian: rather the author enriches them with a wider view of the Slovenian musical space by outlining a kind of musical map, and at the same time explicitly states his opinions on many issues that had previously been unresolved. The work ultimately, however, remains at a sketch-level as there are still many blank spots on this musical map.