Petar Konjovic’s contribution to the constitution and the beginnings of the Institute of Musicology of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts
Authors: Milanovic Biljana 
Published: February 2019

In the text I deal with the period of establishment and the beginnings of the
work of the Institute of Musicology of the Serbian Academy of Sciences,
which is marked by the role of composer and music writer Petar Konjovic
(1883- 1970), who founded and was the first director of the Institute
(1947-1954). I examined and problematized Konjovic?s efforts to establish
and manage the institution, which were inseparable from his role of Fellow
of the Academy and Secretary of the Department of Fine Arts and Music of the
Serbian Academy of Sciences (1948-1954), through the analysis of archival
documentation. The basic assumption that I started from was related to the
interdependence between (1) the establishment of an institutional order and
(2) the disciplining of scientific research in the direction of the
emergence of musicology and ethnomusicology in the local context. In
particular, issues related to the Institute?s relationship with the wider
organizational environment and research policy of the SAN, as well as the
role and support of its significant individuals in the process of the
institutionalization of music science were especially highlighted. The
problem of acquiring legitimacy in clearly hierarchical relationships proved
to be very complex, since the Institute represented, on the one hand, a
scientific unit of the Academy of Arts, that is, the Department of Fine Arts
and Music, which, on the other hand, was marked by the inheritance of
marginalized status of artists in comparison to other entities within the
SAN. The formation of scientific tasks and objectives and the questions
related to their realization were shaped in such a context. I analyzed these
problems within three subchapters. The first of them provides basic
information on the reorganization of the Serbian Academy of Sciences within
the framework of the cultural policy of the new regime and deals with the
aspects of the formal establishment of the Institute (1947) and the
contextualization of the first programmatic projections of its work. The
second question relates to the diverse problems that accompanied the delay
of the start of the Institute?s activities, while the final subchapteris
dedicated to the period from hiring the first associates to the end of
Konjovic?s directorship (1948-1954). Konjovic?s strategies pointed to his
simultaneous stability and flexibility in the design of thematic areas and
methodological approaches. The policy of the scientific-research work of the
Institute of Musicology from Konjovic?s time can be outlined in several
general aspects: reliance on pre-war experiences, without the destruction of
inherited value canons, but with constant changes in the direction of
widening the scope of processed material through research of hitherto
neglected creative personalities, performing practices and institutions;
melographed and studied folklore material from various rural and urban
areas, including different national and ethnic communities; the
establishment of completely new thematic areas in the local context that
destabilize the concept of purely national science; the emphasis on
interdisciplinarity and openness to communication and exchange of scientific
and methodological experiences in the international context. Konjovic?s
position at the Serbian Academy of Sciences, his experience in managing
various institutions, persistence and strategically planned actions, his
high criteria and consideration in the selection of associates, managing
without ideological divergences from his position of the bourgeois pre-war
intellectual, but also his patient waiting for certain decisions of the
competent instances, were crucial for the constitution and survival of the
Institute of Musicology, within which the platform of musicological and
ethnomusicological disciplines in Serbia was established in just a few
years.