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.

Chapter 5 is a case study of two notable pioneers of electronic music in Yugoslavia – Vladan Radovanović and Ludmila Frajt. Even though Frajt joined the Communist Party early on, which enabled her to hold some of the most powerful positions in the country, her creative process was not guided by the doctrine of socialist realism. Rather, she was seeking innovative ways to expand her sound palette. Her distinctive oeuvre of film, instrumental, electronic, and vocal music is derived simultaneously from Yugoslav folk and Western avant-garde elements. Thus, although she was particularly drawn to Lutosławski’s aleatory processes, Penderecki’s use of clusters and nonstandard treatment of instruments, and György Ligeti’s micropolyphony, Frajt also presented these techniques within the Yugoslav folk idiom. Radovanović was a true catalyst for change. His oeuvre pushed the limits of every art form – in addition to his advances in the domains of electroacoustic and computer music, Radovanović pursued poetry and visual arts, which he synthesized with acoustic elements. In his other works, Radovanović also incorporated kinetic features, created conceptual and polymedia projects, and devised working with the body as an object, tactile art, plastic art, meta-art, transmedia, transmodalism, metamusical projects, and computerized music based on Stochastic principles.