This paper examines Divertimento for String Orchestra, Vibraphone and Percussion (1987) by Dušan Radić as a paradigmatic example of Serbian postwar musical modernism, focusing on the composer's critical engagement with historical genre models. The central goal of the study is to demonstrate that Radić's use of the divertimento does not represent a neoclassical restoration of an 18th-century genre, but rather a modernist strategy of intertextual reference and genre resemantization, grounded in historical distance, negation of traditional functionality, and autonomy of musical material. By situating the work within the theoretical frameworks of Theodor W. Adorno and Carl Dahlhaus, the paper seeks to clarify Radić's position within the aesthetic horizon of modernism and, more specifically, within the concept of “moderate modernism” (Milin 2006) in Serbian music after the Second World War.

Methodologically, the paper combines analytical interpretation of the musical text with a critical-theoretical approach. The analysis draws on genre theory, Adorno's critique of neoclassicism and concept of negative dialectics, and Dahlhaus's understanding of musical modernism as a historically self-conscious discourse in which tradition appears as a problem rather than a continuous lineage. These theoretical perspectives are integrated with insights from Serbian musicological scholarship, particularly the work of Melita Milin and Vesna Mikić, in order to contextualize Radić's compositional procedure within broader developments in Serbian postwar music. Musical parameters such as pitch organization, rhythm, formal articulation, and timbre are examined not in isolation, but as carriers of aesthetic meaning that mediate the work's critical relationship to tradition.

The main outcome of the paper is the interpretation of Radić's Divertimento as an autonomous modernist work in which the historical genre functions as a metatextual and negatively defined reference. Traditional attributes of the divertimento – lightness, formal clarity, and functional transparency – are shown to be deliberately decontextualized and transformed within a post-tonal musical language characterized by structurally articulated rhythm and an expanded timbral field. In this context, the vibraphone and percussion assume a constructive, structural role rather than a decorative one, further undermining the genre's original social and functional associations with entertainment music. The study concludes that Radić's compositional strategy exemplifies a critical, reflective engagement with tradition that aligns with Adorno's and Dahlhaus's conceptions of modernism, while simultaneously contributing to a specifically Serbian variant of moderate modernism. Through this lens, Divertimento emerges as a key work for understanding the negotiation between tradition and innovation in Serbian music after World War II.

Adorno, T. W. (2006). Philosophy of new music (R. Hullot-Kentor, Trans.). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Dahlhaus, C. (1982). Esthetics of music (W. W. Austin, Trans.). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Milin, M. (2006). Etape modernizma u srpskoj muzici. Muzikologija, 6, 93–116.

Mikić, V. (2009). Lica srpske muzike – Neoklasicizam. Beograd: Fakultet muzičke umetnosti, Katedra za muzikologiju.

Veselinović-Hofman, M. (2017). What, how, and why in Serbian music after the Second World War, in the light of ideological-political upheavals. Muzikologija/Musicology, 23, 15–29.