The Roots of a National Music Canon and the Taboo of Composing Folk Tunes

The cycle of 15 garlands, or folk-song medleys composed by Stevan Stojanović Mokranjac at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century forms the core of the Serbian art music canon. Thus, it is not surprising that vindicating Mokranjac’s ‘originality’ has been one of the main objectives of Serbian musicological discourse. Arguing against what had been seen as a rude dismissal of Mokranjac’s garlands in the writings of some of his contemporaries, who called them ‘arrangements’ instead of ‘artworks’, later musicologists insisted that Mokranjac invested an original and artistic contribution in composing the garlands, while capturing the true spirit of Serbian folk-song.