CROATIAN MUSIC – MILO CIPRA

Composer, music writer and pedagogue, Milo Cipra (Vareš, 13th of October 1906 – Zagreb, 9th of July 1985) completed his secondary education in Sarajevo (1915 – 1926), and then came to Zagreb to study at the Faculty of Philosophy where he graduated in German studies and philosophy; he also graduated in composition at the Zagreb Music Academy where he studied under Blagoje Bersa. At the same time he attended the then noteworthy lectures on visual arts given by Ljubo Babić at the People’s University [now Open University]. He spent his working life first as a secondary school teacher, teaching German and philosophy in Cetinje (1934 – 1935), Nova Gradiška (1935 – 1937) and Karlovac (1937 – 1940). Starting from 1940, he spent a shorter period in Zagreb as a gymnasium teacher, and from 1941 to 1977 he was professor at the Zagreb Music Academy (in the period 1961 – 1971 he was dean of the Academy). At the Academy he taught composition, analysis of musical forms and methodology of teaching music. He was associate member of the Yugoslav Academy of Sciences and Arts and also received numerous prominent awards and acknowledgements. After his return to Zagreb, with his educational background, his interest and education particularly connected with German culture and art, Cipra developed multiple meaningful activities with music as the centre of his creative interest. He was obliged by his social activities to fulfil his numerous engagements in the Croatian Association of Composers (he was president of the Association twice, from 1948 to 1952 and from 1956 to 1962), the Association of Croatian Music Pedagogues and the Union of Croatian Music Associations. On the other hand, he undertook to offer a series of lectures in the mid-fifties of the last century under the title “Word, colour, sound of the epoch” held at the People’s University in Zagreb, and these lectures were to be remembered for his exceptionally inspired, interesting and topical way of presentation. He gradually developed his composer’s expression in the first post-war years, and from his pre-war beginnings, created in the shadow of the so called neo-national trend, he gradually merged his ideas into a characteristic and interesting author’s assimilation of new perceptions and events in contemporary music. These gradual steps would “internationalize” the composer’s expression and finally shape Milo Cipra’s author’s style of as one of the most important styles in the Croatian music of the 20th century. “His early works are written in neo-classic style”, wrote the musicologist Dalibor Davidović, “that reflect the influence of folklore in their frequent metric changes, modality and formal unity achieved by the development of the motif. In the works that follow the Fourth String Quartet (1939), all up to the mid-fifties, the influence of folklore vanished, and the form became a by-product of the thematic dualism and its developmental feature.” The process of the mentioned internationalization of expression can easily be observed in the first post-war opuses, and an important place in this process belongs to the Sonata for the piano (1954), and it would also be reflected in the orchestral suite for the winds, piano, harp and percussion instruments called The Sun’s Path (1958/1959), a cycle of 12 movements/variations named after the signs of the zodiac, where the composer used the elements of the twelve-tone technique. This technique would some years later also mark the composition Aubade (1965) for the wind quintet. In the last period of Cipra’s creative work one of the supporting points from the area of chamber music is the anthological Fifth String Quartet and the orchestral piece Triptych of Dalmatian Cities (1969 – 1976), where the composer was to unite his own perception of music trends of the second half of the 20th century in an impeccably balanced expression. Restraint, exactness of shaping where the feeling for proportions powerfully overruled the form of the work, the sense of decorous musical narration, ideological concept always hidden in the background of musical ideas, all these are features of Milo Cipra’s opus that characterize his work as one of the chief representatives of the composer’s heritage in the 20th century Croatian music.