2024/07/03 by Ivana Medić · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Balkans: History, Politics, Society #Byzantine Studies and History #European Cultural and National Identity
paper · doi:10.1080/07494467.2025.2558451
openalex publication_date 2024/07/03 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/02
This article examines original and idiosyncratic appropriation of musical (post)minimalism in Serbian-American composer Vuk Kulenović’s work Hilandarska zvona [Hilandar Bells], for piano, written in 1992, just before he emigrated to the United States, where he spent the last twenty-five years of his life. Aside from illustrating Kulenović’s employment of (post)minimalist techniques to achieve archaisation and tone painting (mainly to emulate the bells of the twelfth-century Hilandar Monastery), this work also showcases the composer’s expression of Orthodox Christian spirituality in music, which was quite unexpected, given his mixed ethnic background and cosmopolitan upbringing. I also reflect on the context of the early 1990s that gave social and political relevance to Kulenović’s relentlessly repetitive and (self-)referential works, which were lost after he emigrated to the US.