Two Modes of the Avant-Garde’s Disintegration in Twenty-First-Century Serbian Music

Abstract

To discuss Serbian twenty-first-century avant-garde music means to address two key phenomena: (1) the avant-garde’s position in postmodernism, which—established in its form in the mid-1970s—has persisted over the past two decades of the twenty-first century; and (2) a modification of that position, which has concurrently manifested itself in Serbian music since the late 1980s. The first phenomenon refers to the condition of treating the avant-garde in postmodernism, like any other style from the musical past, as devoid of its internal hierarchy and authentic being. More precisely, it has been treated as a ‘collection’ of artefacts, i.e. constitutive components, into which the avant-garde has been ‘disassembled’ or ‘dismantled’. The second phenomenon concerns a certain tendency to transcend that de-hierarchising impulse precisely by using postmodernist tools. Namely, it concerns the postmodernist ‘validation’ of indicators associated with various creative tendencies from the past, among them also some modernist concepts, including those that once qualified as avant-garde. In other words, in neither of those two instances does the avant-garde in Serbian twenty-first-century music exist the way it did before the advent of postmodernism, but instead becomes part of a phenomenon that I regard as postmodernist modernism.