Contribution short abstract:

The paper examines post-1945 Romanian, Serbian, and Hungarian music historiographies, revealing the construction of separate national narratives. By unwriting these narratives, the new methodological framework transcends both nationalist and Marxist legacies while acknowledging Western influences.

Contribution long abstract:

This presentation examines how Romanian, Serbian, and Hungarian musicological historiography after 1945 constructed distinct national narratives that deliberately obscured shared historical experiences and interconnections. The research reveals that although six key elements of musical culture (education, performances, audience, professional press, business infrastructure, and identity-based legendarium) demonstrate remarkably similar patterns across the region, national music historiographies systematically erased these parallels and interconnections.

It is particularly instructive that all three musical cultures were initially oriented towards Vienna, and subsequently towards German and French centres, which contributed to the lack of inter-regional dialogue. This centre-oriented developmental model paradoxically persisted in both Marxist and nationalist historiographies, even as both approaches explicitly opposed Western cultural dominance.

The presentation performs the operation of 'unwriting' on three levels:

1. It reveals the constructed nature of national narratives and the ambivalence of relationships with Western centres

2. It deconstructs the ideological motivations behind separate historiographies

3. It proposes a transcultural rewriting that does not erase but rather recontextualizes national specificities

Thus, rather than merely comparing the practices of these three countries, the presentation proposes a methodological framework that enables the decolonization of music historiography from both nationalist and Marxist legacies, as well as from the Western centre-periphery model, while preserving valuable insights from these approaches.