Article received on June 1, 2004

A result of many years of the author’s research of European frameworks of national music, Katarina Tomašević’s doctoral dissertation focuses on the phenomena that initiated, provoked and significantly marked the lines of development of musical output and the circumstances in Serbian music in the decades between the two World Wars. The analyses in this study have been carried out for the purpose of isolating and differentiating precisely those phenomena which, being dominant and crucial in the processes of transcending the previous music tradition and practice, exerted vital influence on the transformation of the physiognomy of Serbian music towards its modernization. The essential method of the comparative analytical procedure – determining the types of relationships established between innovation and tradition – is also the basic criteria for deriving various typologies, those arising from monitoring micro-changes within the very structure of music works and their stylistic aspect as well as broader ones, which encompass developmental tendencies within the creative trajectory of an author or a whole group of creators. Serving as a point of departure for systematizing the results of historical, analytical and theoretical research, the relations old-new, traditional-modern, national-cosmopolitan were also presented as being key to understanding not only the typical features of the analyzed period of Serbian music and the local artistic surroundings, but also the general characteristics of the lines of development of European art as its referential context. Seemingly structured as a mosaic, the text of the dissertation is realized by polyphonically leading several principal ideas through five chapters representing methodological variations of the central theme of the work. In addition to a definition of the subject and goal of the research, the Uvod (Introduction)(Chapter I) includes a review of musicological literature dedicated to Serbian music between the two World Wars, discusses the state of the material itself and the extent to which it has been examined, highlights the problems detected within the very term Serbian music between the two