ABSTRACT
In the period after the Second World War, Yugoslav and – by extension – Serbian music went through a number of transformations.1 After a phase dominated by the ideological model of socialist realism, which fortunately did not possess as much of an iron grip as it had done in the Soviet Union, new horizons and perspectives began to open up. Neoclassicism gained momentum in the early 1950s, manifesting itself in the works of Milan Ristić (1908-82), Dušan Radić (1929-2010) and Dejan Despić (b. 1930), although composers such as Predrag Milošević (1904-88) had already tended towards the style during the 1920s. While the 1950s and early 1960s were dominated by neoclassicism, new trends in the European postwar avant-garde also gradually found their way into Serbian music. The mid-1960s saw the emergence of counterparts to the Polish school of composers, such as Rajko Maksimović (b. 1935).
