About the Biennale...

From the Biennale history:

MILKO KELEMEN, Honorary President of the Council, Zagreb Music Biennale

"It is no secret, that, subsequent to the Second World War, Yugoslavia developed in complete isolation. It had always been clear to me that the roots of my home town, Zagreb. were intertwined with those of Western culture; and that something had to be done to establish Zagreb as the centre of new music in Yugoslavia, from which the other republics would also be able to revolutionise their musical thought. In this way, it would be possible to put the idea of equality into effect, and to affirm Yugoslavian music on an internatinal scale. Music Biennale has been carrying on the tradition of the past years, and the concept of synthesis in New Music today is considered as a possible alternative.
In this way, it is left to the composer to project his individuality into elements appearing in music, thus finding opportunity for his own specific expression. Music,old or new, is not an ornament but an important social merit which derives from its anthropological activity, from its ability to address the pluralism of human beings, so as to enrich individuality - the greatest value in every Man."

IVO JOSIPOVIĆ PhD, Director of the Music Biennale Zagreb
"In the colourful MBZ garden, planted with thousands of flowers, "spiky" creatures of avant-garde were nurtured during certain periods while some other periods appreciated soft buds of minimalism. At times, however, certain neo-trends were favoured, or, on the other hand, unusual offspring of so-called post-modernism. For some, the MBZ was Finck's Epicurus's garden, a source of spiritual pleasure and enjoyment in music, and for the others, a laboratory of new sound from where creations worth admiring emerged, but also "monsters" alien to an average music lover. The MBZ has always been both praised and belittled, being a pet and a stepchild of the critics at the same time, a cult event and a cultural scandal.
No matter how we evaluate the history of the MBZ we can say without a doubt that Croatian musical culture would not have been the same without it. The first Festival in the new millennium will show the influence of globalisation as the most prominent trend at the end of the 20th century. The encounters of different cultures will not cause less opposition on the part of globalisation opponents than the MMF meetings or other cardinals of globalisation. Perhaps this is so because the encounters of different cultures could and should be viewed in light of the acceptance of their diversities, in other words, as an opposition to a possible melting pot of various societies and their cultures.

NIKŠA GLIGO PhD, musicologist
"The contemporary and the avant-garde have to be strictly defined at the very beginning in order to understand the framework of events in Croatian music discussed here:
a) Contemporary music in general sense of the word can be any music created in its time. In the narrower sense, from the 20th century perspective, the concept as an aesthetic category refers to the 20th century music which corresponds to the spirit ot its time.
b) On the contrary, the avant-garde in relation to the contemporary is determined by entirely different criteria. If we are to analyse it within the framework of historical development, we have to consider the fulfilment of its anticipations which determine its temporal initiative, being outside its time.
The Biennale "injection" imposed on generations of Croatian composers the necessity of facing contemporariness on global terms while opening the way for testing the applicability and elasticity of various global avant-garde trends.
It is useful to recall the attitude expressed by the Argentinian-German composer Mauricio Kagel in 1966 who, when asked "How does a composer compose today?", answered "The way it suits him." (Kagel 1966:319) This is an interesting attitude clearly indicating that in the late 1960s the fundamental canons of what is usually termed "mainstream" were no longer obligatory, i.e. the progress of music is beginning to depend solely on the composer's attitude, on his own choice of techniques and (corresponding) styles. It opens the way to a wide range of techniques and styles which are described as pluralism.
Answers to the question What is new and what is Croatian in the new Croatian music? appear on several levels:
a) "new" refers to a caution in the acceptance of the contemporary with various nuances of critical attitudes towards the avant-garde;
b) "Croatian" is the variety of pluralism obtained."

SEADETA MIDŽIĆ, Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Croatia

"Like all festivals of contemporary music emerging from small countries, the Biennale was an offspring of a desperate existential wish, a creatino of immense effort and transgressions.
The Music Biennale Zagreb is the origin of sparkling energy bursting in all directions where the creative force of an individual is not only directed towards breaking the horizon borders, but towards filling the circle and making it meaningful.
The strength of Biennale lies in the longing for true, risky freedom and high artistic achievement, in participating in the new, therefore exciting, which means the beautiful and fatal.
The city which is the one and only true holder of the festival, the basis and initiator of every creative takeoff, is at the same time the frame of the festival.
The crystalline core of the music, which decades of the twentieth century aspired to, accumulated many non-nusical happenings, stories, gestures and actions. Thus, as a rain-swollen river of different currents and waves moved from the sacred concert venues encountering new musical ideas while taking on new places and new functions along the way. The musical elan thus melts into energy that has the power to conceive and transform the environment, to question everyday life and discover a lonely human being, his strength lying only in the readiness to bear the consequences of his choice. A seemingly destructive freedom with no limits, questioning criteria and endurance is not only a negation of the inherited, but the duty to recognize the world of the irrelevant and unnoticed and to discover a new centre of gravity and to point towards multimedia. Impressive structures of works emerge (arising not only out of musical necessity, need and substance), and not creating or developing a new language but a new behaviour in the world.
The Zagreb Music Biennale remains an ongoing reader, holder and signpost of our spiritual destiny, literally of our existence.