Музика у српској документарно-уметничкој прози друге половине 19. века
Music in Serbian Documentary Prose in the Second Half of the XIX Century

Summary/Abstract: In this study the documentary prose (memoirs, diaries, autobiographies and travelogues, as well as selected biographical essays about the renowned individuals) written in the second half of the XIX century by prominent Serbian cultural workers, artists, statesmen, journalists and politicians is regarded as a valuable material for exploring the links and flows between Serbian cultural and musical histories. The sources confirm that, both in the public and private spheres, music was an important segment of all strata of the XIX-century Serbian society in complex geopolitical and cultural-historical contexts. In a diachronic perspective the analysed material reflects the dynamics and evolution of the types of presence of music and musical life in all countries populated by the Serbs in this period: the Habsburg Monarchy, the Principality and Kingdom of Serbia and the Serbian enclaves in other nations. The documents testify about the place of music in the spheres of personal interest, affinities and experiences of the writers and their contemporaries, i.e. they reflect the status of music in the context of everyday cultural life of the Serbs in the XIX century. By means of separate thematic descriptions of music in the sources, the music creators, performers and audiences are portrayed, the activities of important music institutions are presented, various types and opportunities for making music are described, the aspects of musical interpretation are commented on, and the features of traditions of vocal and instrumental musical practices from different regions are analysed. The collected sources have been analysed and assessed with respect to their contents and the authors’ attitudes, and the deliberation of the hypotheses posed here is compliant with the inspection of the relevant studies from the realms of general and cultural histories, histories of literature and literary criticism, music history, cultural anthropology and art history. Due to the nature of the sources, these testimonies usually point to an individualised, partial perspective, often subordinated to the function and type of text, the poetics of certain authors and the concepts of specific memoirs. The “level of documentarity” of the memoire sources is discussed separately, as well as the dependence of the types of writings about music on the nature of the genres of documentary prose.

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