Modernism in East and West: Contrasts, Intersections and Parallels: Programme Booklet

In 2024, the important Slovenian composers Lojze Lebič and Vinko Globokar will cel­ebrate their 90th birthdays. In addition to their year of birth, both composers also share a commitment to the radical aesthetics of post-war modernism. Although they each implement these aesthetics very specific ways, in many respects their solutions seem to be linked to a different acceptance of the modernist tradition. While Glo­bokar encountered the modernist tradition in the “first person” in Paris and Berlin as part of a broader modernist context, Lebič  remained in Slovenia most of the time and absorbed the influences of modernism “second hand”, mainly through visits to the Warsaw Autumn Festival and the Zagreb Biennale. The conference attempts to place the dichotomy revealed by the comparison of the two composers in the context of differences in the perception and imple­mentation of modernist ideas in the European East and West. Rather than being a geographical divide, this is understood primarily as a socio-political divide through which the whole of Europe was caught up in a global conflict between the two su­perpowers, the United States of America and the Soviet Union, and thus between capitalist logic and socialist dogmatism.