The Non-Aligned Humanism of Rudolf Bruči: The Composer And The Society of Self-Management Socialism

Abstract

In 1979 the oratorio We Are All a Single Party was performed, composed by the Yugoslav composer Rudolf Bruči, 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 self-management 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 Bruči’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 Bruči – 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 Bruči’s compositions become coherent subjective (Bruči’s personal) and objective (social) achievements.