While early postwar musical modernist explorations seemed progressive during the 1950s, Yugoslav composers faced European and American avant-garde trends at the inaugural Music Biennale Zagreb in 1961. Founded by Croatian composer Milko Kelemen, who refused to conform to the demands of socialist realism, the Zagreb Biennale was the most significant cultural event in Yugoslavia in the early 1960s and continued to play a pivotal role in the country’s cultural diplomacy over the next three decades. Taking advantage of the Cold War political divisions, Yugoslavia’s unique position as a “liberal” communist state that did not belong to either bloc, and an economic model that adopted elements of socialism and capitalism, Kelemen devised a plan that reads like a Cold War spy novel. Pitting the Soviets against the Americans and Western Europeans with fabricated stories, Kelemen managed to secure the participation of the most recognizable figures in contemporary music in the US and Europe. Consequently, his festival became one of the most relevant international festivals of contemporary music and a forum for Yugoslavia’s engagement with Western avant-gardism.

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.