In this paper, the territorial frameworks are set with the aim of forming a regional histor?ical synthesis dedicated to the creation of art music in Vojvodina, a synthesis that differs from those offered in previous music historiographies. It can be said that the composers who greatly contributed to the development of the musical life of the Vojvodina communities in the interwar period have made modest contributions to the ?local type? musical modernism. In the second half of the 20th century, they were involved in determining the place of ?new music? within modernism and realism in the Cold War period. The Serbian National Theatre, the Association of Composers of Vojvodina and the Academy of Arts in Novi Sad gave support to compositional practice in Vojvodina after the Second World War.

In 1979 the oratorio We Are All a Single Party was performed, composed by the Yugoslav composer Rudolf Bruci, who in an interview for the Novi Sad daily newspaper Dnevnik explained his driving motives in the following way: ?I wanted to preserve the spirit of our revolutionary songs and to speak in a modern, familiar way, understandable to everyone, about the decades in which our revolution was born and grew; about the legendary activities of pre-war communists, the difficult days of the War of National Liberation, the liberation and reconstruction of the country, about Tito and his invaluable contribution to the development of our selfmanagement socialism and non-aligned humanism? (Dnevnik, 10 April, 1979). In this article I argue that the syntagm ?non-aligned humanism? is suitable for identifying the connection between the aesthetic and the political in Rudolf Bruci?s creative output, observed as a consistent author?s opus. At the core of this thesis lies the assumption that non-alignment in regard to the West or East was a major political and aesthetic orientation of Yugoslav self-management socialism. The intersubjective field of this self-management socialist pluralism produced creative entities - composers such as Bruci - whose works were created under the principles of direct political engagement and modernist aestheticism as different manifestations of the same ideology. Within the specific rationality of non-aligned humanism, the concrete poetic-morphological characteristics of Bruci?s compositions become coherent subjective (Bruci?s personal) and objective (social) achievements.

The composer and violist Szilárd Mezei has made a significant, decades-long contribution to contemporary music in the national and international contexts. Although his artistic approach can be linked to the musical universe of György Szabados, an author who became one of the most influential creative figures in the Central European cultural space during the 1970s and 1980s, Mezei is a special phenomenon on the local music scene. With his ensemble mostly comprising prominent Novi Sad musicians, Mezei has a large number of discographic achievements to his credit in the space between composition and improvisation. Mezei divided his compositional opus into genre corpora of chamber and orchestral music, of which the review of chamber music is the subject of research in this paper.

A look at the morphology of the musical language of the Vojvodina composer Szilárd Mezei reveals different relations among its composing layers. On a selection of fifteen of Mezei's chamber compositions, the basis of their compositional structure was abstracted and typologically classified into four fundamental ways of coexistence of textural layers. These modalities are defined as differentiated congruence. The chosen syntagm does not refer to the mathematico-logical meaning of congruence , but to the resemantization of that notion in the context of the fact-object reality of musical space-time. Although none of these four types of congruence is specific only to the musical world of Szilárd Mezei, the fact that they appear in the composer's work somewhat proportionally indicates specific ideological aspirations included in the poetic plane of the work.

In this text, Rudolf Brucci?s opera Gilgamesh is viewed in the light of Ralph Locke?s ?All the Music in the Full Context? Paradigm which promotes the approach that one should search for the exotic elements in musical works first in the discursive components (title, program, accompanying notes), visual representations (costume, scenery) and a ?horizon of expectations? of a particular culture, and only then to observe exoticism as the aspect of a musical style. In the light of this Paradigm, ?exoticism? of the opera Gilgamesh is detected at the level of the music material and compositional procedures, but not in the dramaturgical profiling of characters, narrative adaptation of the Sumerian epic, costumes and scenery. The plot, costumes and the scenery of the opera do not construct the Orient with either positive or negative projections attributed to it by the Western European Orientalist discourse, but portray Gilgamesh and Enkidu as ancient mythic protagonists on the margin of the (not-always) exoticist once/now binarism. The musical language of the opera, which abounds in the usage of oriental musical scales and citations, indicates that oriental/exotic was one of the author?s ?target levels? when conceiving and composing Gilgamesh. Brucci, however, did not build the ?ethnological model? in his opera, but gave oriental scales and ?exotic? musical citations their meaning within the Western musical tradition, which is why his approach can be compared with the ?veiled exoticism? of the French composers of the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. In the light of the self/other binarism, reaching for the exotic in Gilgamesh can be presented as an auto-exotic creative behavior of Brucci as a composer who perceives his ?minority identity? in a relation to an imaginary referential system of the Center. However, I am more inclined to see Brucci?s identificational intention in his advocacy of the Yugoslav NAM (Non-Aligned Movement) project, and his dealing with the ?exotic? as part of his strategy to support cultural achievements of the Third World which predominantly participated in that project.