Lectures of the prof. Ana Stefanović and Prof. Tijana Popović Mlađenović
Jewish Community of Belgrade / Gallery
27. January 2019
An important part of the Rossi Fest program is dedicated to the education and affirmation of music students and young music professionals. Therefore, in addition to the concerts of local and foreign performers, the competition for young composers, and the master course for young opera singers, the program included lectures by eminent musicologists.
In the gallery of the Jewish Comunnittz Belgrade, on January 27th, 2019, two professional lectures were given by the professors of the Faculty of Music Art in Belgrade, Dr Ana Stefanovic and Dr. Tijana Popovic Mlađenovic.
Ana Stefanović, musicologist, Professor at the University of Arts, Faculty of Music (Department of Musicology), in Belgrade and Associate Researcher at IreMus, Paris. She received her MA degree at the Faculty of Music in Belgrade and her PhD in musicology at the University Paris IV Sorbonne. Main areas of her research are baroque opera, solo song, the relation between music and text, as well as questions of musical style and stylistic analysis. She is engaged in several international and national projects in musicology and is the author of a large number of studies and articles published in reviews for musicology and music theory, and in collected papers. She edited several issues of collected papers and organized several international conferences. She published the books: La musique comme métaphore. La relation de la musique et du texte dans l’opéra baroque français: de Lully à Rameau, Paris, L’Harmattan, 2006; Temporality and Narraivity in Music Drama, Beograd, FMU, 2017. She is also the author of the Anthology of Serbian Art Song I–VI, Belgrade, UKS, 2008–2014.
David et Jonathas, the biblical opera by Marc-Antoine Charpentier
In this lecture, we deal with the particular position of Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s tragédie en musique David et Jonathas (1688) on the libretto by François Bretonneau, one of two operas based on the Old Testament − besides Jephté (1732) by Michel Montéclair − in the whole French baroque repertoire. Beyond that, the unique position of this work in the history of music lies in the fact that it is, in its first performance in the college of Jesuits Luis le Grand in Paris, performed in combination with the other biblical, literary drama, Saul by Father Étienne Chamillard. This opera is in this sense strongly marked by several crossings: of two religious and cultural paradigms, Judean and Christian / Catholic, of two genres, literary and musical tragedy, of two spheres, sacred and profane – the crossing obtained by the insertion of the religious subject in a secular musical genre −, and finally, of musical generic models, also involving a stylistic and musical poetic mixture that come from this opposition. The conference will focus on these multiple crossings, giving this Charpentier’s opera a special place in the French and European lyric field.
Dr Tijana Popović Mladjenović is a musicologist, full-time Professor at the Department of Musicology of the Faculty of Music, University of Arts in Belgrade, and Head of the Musicology Department Council. She has been a visiting professor at the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance, the University in Ljubljana, the Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre, and the Music Academy in Sarajevo.
Her main research interests include the European music of the fin de siècle, contemporary music (she specialized in contemporary French music at the University of Paris IV Sorbonne), aesthetics and philosophy of music, and issues concerning thinking in music. She is the author of six books.
Concerto for Viola and Orchestra / Viola Tango Rock Concerto
Benjamina Yusupova
Music has a Vision – Listening to Others and Oneself through It
Since music is primarily a cultural phenomenon (because there is no culture without music and because every man possesses that subtle skill of significantly yet intuitively understanding music), whose essential feature is diversity (the plentitude, variety and coexistence of musical identities), the question that always imposes itself and now seems especially intriguing is when and how music moves us, or to what are we moved? In other words, if we model ourselves through music both as individuals and as participants in culture, and if in constructing musical traditions, we model the way culture is constructed by building the consensus of musical belief and commitment on which musical collaboration depends – the question that imposes itself is how does music give us a new identity today, which is both thoroughly other and fully ours, or to what extent people now tune their sense of self to (different) music (identities)?
From a postmodern perspective, the basic work of culture is to construct subject positions, and the primary action of music in this era is not to express but to invite subjectivity. In this context, the general power of music to implant subjective states in the listener that are paradoxically both native and alien, is perceived using the work of Benjamin Yusupov as an example (his approach combines the specific cultural identities of various ethnic groups with different styles of art and popular Western music), primarily his Concerto for Viola and Orchestra / Viola Tango Rock Concerto (2003).
