Rudolf Bruci and the Criticism of the European Avant-garde

Yugoslav composer Rudolf Bruci is known on the international scene primarily as the author of Sinfonia Lesta, a composition winning the first prize in 1965 at the Queen Elizabeth Competition in Belgium. On a national level, Bruci was a powerful social entity, not only in respect of his creative freedom. As a member of the League of Communists, Bruci spent a lifetime as an official in social organizations and cultural institutions, thus dictating the rhythm of musical life of Novi Sad and the Province of Vojvodina, until the collapse of Socialism when he was suddenly forgotten. The developmental line of Bruci's oeuvre - leading from Zhdanovian national classicism, through the adoption of elements of the European avant-garde, to the reaffirmation of a national/regional idiom in the mid-1970s - largely corresponds to the general tendencies of postwar art music in the socialist countries of Eastern and South-Eastern Europe. Bruci broke with the European avant-garde models not only in his creative practice, but he also reasoned it in the articles "The Composers' Role in the Modern Development of Self-governing Socialist Society," " Statements of Yugoslav Music Forum Composers' Workgroup," and "Manifesto of the 'Third Avant-Garde'," where he based his discourse on conformism, lack of communication and dehumanization of avant-garde, and in particular on Yugoslav ideological projects, such as self-management, non-alignment, and deprovincialization. The article analyzes the context in which Bruci's creative transformation during the 1970s was expressed as the criticism of the Eurocentric cultural model, as well as the suspicion towards the imperative of modernization in a world obsessed with technological advances.