Authors

Discussion

An outstanding female composer Ljubica Marić (1909–2003) was one of the prominent figures of Serbian art music during the second half of the 20th century. Unlike many Serbian composers, who have been neglected in global research on contemporary music, there already exists a significant scholarship on Marić in English and other languages; most significantly, Melita Milin’s comprehensive monograph on the composer’s life and work, published in 2018. I contributed to the research on Marić’s compositional output in my PhD dissertation Works of the Composers of the Prague Group after World War II in the context of European Modernist Tendencies, defended in 2023 at Faculty of Music, University of Arts in Belgrade. In the chapter dedicated to Marić, I studied the intersections between Marić’s compositional techniques (mainly in her landmark works composed between 1956 and 1963), and those of European and Serbian composers of the late 19th and first half of the 20th century, including Johannes Brahms (1833–1897), Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971), Béla Bartók (1881– 1945), Paul Hindemith (1895–1963), Stevan Stojanović Mokranjac (1856–1914), and Josip Slavenski (1896–1955).

In this paper, I focus on the use of chants from the first ‘mode’ of the Octoechos [Oktōēchos, in Serbian: Osmoglasnik], as transcribed by Mokranjac and practiced in Serbian Orthodox Church during the late 19th century. Marić uses this chant in the introductory piece of the cycle Music of Octoechos (1958–1963), titled Octoechos 1 [Oktoiha 1 (1958/59)], for symphony orchestra. In this piece, the chant of the first mode becomes a tone row, which is freely permutated, expanded and contracted, through addition, substitution or subtraction of pitches, thus raising questions on the manifestations of antiquity, spirituality, and contemporaneity in Marić’s works.