' Similar tendencies can also be observed in Serbian art music since the late 1950s, with an increasing desire to 'catch up' with the dominant currents of European musical (high) modernism. He defined it as a ' unique formation that emerged at the crossroads of the features of Eastern and Western cultural models. It is my goal to analyse the main facets of 'socialist modernism' and to compare this notion to other prominent terms, which are commonly used to describe the art music production of the majority of Serbian composers in the given period, notably to 'moderated modernism' and 'neoclassicism.' Denegri used the notion of 'socialist modernism' to point to the specific position of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia 'between East and West' during the Cold War. Miško Šuvaković), they have not been applied to the study of Serbian and Yugoslav music history. While both terms have been widely used to discuss the visual arts and architecture (e. The term is borrowed from Serbian art theory, where it was introduced by Ješa Denegri, who defined 'socialist modernism' as a further development of the notion of 'socialist aestheticism', which was the first sign of distancing from the 'socialist realism' as the dominant aesthetic position in the years immediately after the end of the WWII.

In this paper I discuss the notion of 'socialist modernism' and argue for its introduction into Serbian music history and musicology as an appropriate label for a vast number of works composed in the seventh and eighth decades of the 20 th Century.

Katalin Ladik, who synthesized the traditions of Balkan folk music and Hungarian folklore, could work supraethnically, as it were, in this multiethnic Yugoslav context, using the references of multiple cultures, which suited with persistently international spirit of the avantgarde. Her performances attracted lively attention not only on account of an interpretation of poetry and sound that was radically new both in Yugoslavia and abroad at the time her use of the eroticized body also seemed to lack any predecessors in the local avantgarde of the day.

At the same time, linearity was also being replaced in Ladik’s poetic works by an extended notion of poetry, as she realised her actionism in a complex and mutual intermedial relationship between poetry, sound and visuality. Her career as a poet writing in Hungarian language began in the intellectual circles of the neoavantgarde journal Új Symposion (New Symposium) in Novi Sad, but the subversiveness of her feminine practice gave her a distinctive position in the whole Yugoslav neoavantgarde scene as early as the late sixties. This book focuses on the experimental practice of Katalin Ladik, a poet, performer and actress born in the former Yugoslavia.

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