Early Electronic Music Explorations in Yugoslavia and the Formation of the Electronic Music Studio Radio Belgrade
Year: 2026
Type: book-chapter
Abstract: Chapter 4 contextualizes the earliest explorations in the domain of electronic music in Yugoslavia. Besides Malec and Kelemen, who left Yugoslavia in 1955 and worked in electronic music studios abroad, a decade later, a handful of other composers traveled to learn techniques of electroacoustic music at the newly formed studios in Europe and the US. Rajko Maksimović, Natko Devčić, and Aleksandar Obradović went to the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center in New York City to study with Vladimir Ussachevsky, James Randall, and Milton Babbitt. Ludmila Frajt, the first woman in Yugoslavia to work in the domain of electronic (and film) music, went to the Experimental Music Studio of Czechoslovak Radio Plzeň. Vladan Radovanović was trained at the Polish Radio Experimental Studio in Warsaw before returning home to establish the first electronic studio in Yugoslavia – a state-of-the-art, third-generation digital-analog Electronic Studio of the Third Program of Radio Belgrade (EMS). This ethnographic study with interviews with the founder of the studio reveals a compelling, yet little-known story of the formation of the electronic studio in Yugoslavia, the acquisition of the legendary Synthi 100 – the first custom-made instrument designed by Peter Zinovieff and David Cockerell at EMS in London – and how EMS Radio Belgrade became the center for creation, collaboration, and experimentation in electroacoustic music both within and outside the borders of Yugoslavia.
Author: Laura Emmery
Institution: Emory University
Subfield: Music
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W7164198809