Monographs on Composers as a Musicological Genre

Melita Milin

Melita Milin Institute of Musicology, Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Belgrade

Keywords: composer monographs, Serbian composer monographs, monograph on Ljubica Marić, music analysis and biography, self-referentiality of musical works

Abstract

Composer monographs may considerably diverge from one another, depending on their authors’ fundamental views concerning the way and extent to which biographical data should be used as opposed to music analysis. So as not to lapse into mere music Biographik, a monograph should encompass the life and works of its subject in a complementary way – with all the necessary contextualization – and bring them into a meaningful relationship in a well thought-out and critical manner. That ideal goal should be pursued, although usually the result is a more or less successful hybrid of a biography and music analysis.

Author Biography

Melita Milin, Institute of Musicology, Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Belgrade

Melita Milin is a Senior Researcher at the Institute of Musicology, in Belgrade (retired). She studied at the Faculty of Music in Belgrade and obtained her PhD at the University of Ljubljana. Her main research area is twentieth-century Serbian music in a European context, with an emphasis on musical nationalism, relationships of music and politics and the output of Ljubica Marić. She was a member of three international musicological projects; leader of the Institute’s main project (2011–2017); Director of the Institute (2013–2017); co-founder and Editor-in-Chief of the first five annual issues of the journal Muzikologija (2001–2005). She is the author of a book on Serbian music after 1945, and a monograph on Ljubica Marić, the editor of the correspondence between J. Slavenski and his Schott publisher, co-editor of a collection of papers on music in postsocialism, editor of several other collected papers.