Mokranjac at 170: the Year of Mokranjac that arrives in choirs first, the festival second

The first concert of the Year of Mokranjac was played in March, in the hall of the Army House in Belgrade. The Belgrade Madrigal Choir, conducted by Bojan Sudjic, performed the Second Garland in a reading that, among more than twenty ensembles active in the past three decades, had not been heard.

The September festival, the 60th edition of the Mokranjac Days, is only the peak of a year-long celebration. It runs through every music school in Serbia bearing Mokranjac’s name, through the diaspora, and through ensembles that have kept Serbian vocal tradition as a compositional element in their repertoire.

Negotin carries the heaviest task this year. A town of eleven thousand in eastern Serbia. Stevan Stojanovic Mokranjac (1856 to 1914) was born in that very house 170 years ago, and the town that carries his name has held the festival without missing an edition since 1966, even during the 1990s when many other events were suspended.

The jubilee is this year formalised in the Ministry of Culture’s calendar. Every municipality with a music school carrying Mokranjac’s name, and there are more than twenty, has an obligation to organise at least one concert from his work.

Three world premieres announced

The September program runs September 13 to 19, by tradition. Three world premieres are announced.

• Mokranjac’s 1903 Liturgy. The score was found two years ago in the archive of the Orthodox church parish in Negotin. Prepared for performance by conductor Bogdan Djakovic with the Branko Church Choral Society from Nis
• “Apostrof na Mokranjca” (Apostrophe to Mokranjac) by young Serbian composer Marko Karlecik, a festival commission, works with the same folk motifs Mokranjac drew on but through a contemporary choral language
• A reconstruction of the 1937 orchestral arrangement of the Third Garland by Petar Konjovic, not performed in its original form for fifty years

A triple premiere for a single festival is more than usual on the Serbian musical calendar. The Serbian season typically yields two or three world premieres per year, usually distributed across different events. Concentrating all three at the Mokranjac Days is a jubilee decision, but also a confirmation of the institutional standing of a festival that has not had a stable budget for the past two decades.

The context in which the celebration unfolds

Mokranjac had a particular place in Serbian culture. He was the first head of the arts department at the University of Belgrade, the first Serbian composer to work with folk material in a way that was not folkloric but compositional.

His fifteen garlands, assembled from folk songs of Serbia, North Macedonia and Bosnia, were for decades the foundation of the Serbian choral repertoire. In the last twenty years they have entered the broader European choral canon as well, with performances in Berlin, Brussels and Helsinki.

The Year of Mokranjac arrives at a moment when Serbian musical infrastructure, especially choral infrastructure, is facing a generational problem. The RTS Choir, one of the few professional choirs in Serbia, is losing members faster than it recruits. The university choral studio in Belgrade has had recruitment problems for two years now.

In that context, a year that gathers every choral ensemble around a single name is not only a celebration. It is also an attempt to remind everyone of the conditions a tradition needs to survive.

How Negotin pulls this off

The 60th edition is organised by the Stevan Mokranjac House of Culture in Negotin, with a task that has for decades outpaced local capacity.

The director, Aleksandra Jankovic, told local outlet NG Portal that this year’s budget, supported by the Ministry of Culture and a provincial allocation, makes possible what ordinary funding could not. Above all, large guest ensembles from Vojvodina, which are expensive.

Guest ensembles from Vienna, Sofia and Skopje are confirmed. For a festival held in a small hall (the Mokranjac House in central Negotin seats around 400), this means concerts spread across multiple venues in the town, including churches and open-air spaces.

The House of Culture also publishes a special issue of the Mokranjac journal, this year the 27th volume. The journal, which has tracked musicological thought around Mokranjac since 1971, is part of a heritage that is genuinely institutional and not easily dismantled. That matters for a festival that, from time to time, also has to verify itself.

Why is Mokranjac still listenable in 2026?

The question this year’s Mokranjac Days will implicitly raise is not just commemorative. Mokranjac’s music contains:

• a folk language of the 19th century
• harmonic decisions from the second half of the 19th century
• a compositional structure from the early 20th century

Is this combination still listenable to a serious contemporary listener, or is it the kind of object that gets respected but no longer truly heard?

Mokranjac’s music survives because it is not nostalgic. It is technically precise. The garlands were written with a compositional ear that can be recognised at any time. A “Second Garland” on a major stage can still cover the platform in a way that the contemporary choral repertoire has not quite matched.

What do you think: can a composer who worked with folk motifs remain in the canon when folklore itself moves out of the central cultural place?