Glazbena kultura u Splitskoj Katedrali od 1750. do 1940/Musical Culture in the Split Cathedral from 1750 till 1940, and: Katalog muzikalija u Benediktinskom samostanu sv. Petra u Cresu/Catalogue of Music Manuscripts and Prints in the Benedictine Convent of St. Peter in Cres (review)

Glazbena kultura u Splitskoj Katedrali od 1750. do 1940./Musical Culture in the Split Cathedral from 1750 till 1940. By Miljenko Grgic. (Muzikoloske studije/Studies in Musicology, 4.) Zagreb: Hrvatsko muzikolosko drustvo/Croatian Musicological Society, 1997. [243 p. ISBN 953-6090-09-0. $36.]

Katalog muzikalija u Benediktinskom samostanu sv. Petra u Cresu/ Catalogue of Music Manuscripts and Prints in the Benedictine Convent of St. Peter in Cres. By Vedrana Juricic. (Indices collectiorum musicarum tabulariorumque in Croatia, 5.) Zagreb: Hrvatsko muzikolosko drustvo/ Croatian Musicological Society, 2000. [xxii, 349 p. ISBN 953-6090-15-5. $28.]

For several decades our colleagues in Croatia, formerly one of the republics of Yugoslavia but independent since 1993, have toiled diligently, and largely silently as far as the Western musicological community is concerned, in the many scattered and scantily organized musical repositories along the Adriatic coastline, on the islands, and in the inland regions, attempting to bring the materials preserved there to wider scholarly attention. The first Western notice to many of these repositories, mostly Franciscan and Benedictine monastic libraries and holdings within cathedrals and other churches, was in the framework of the fifth volume of RISM C (Directory of Music Research Libraries: Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Yugoslavia, ed. Lilian Pruett [Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1985], 177-267). The Croatian Musicological Society supports a variety of publications, some attaining circulation and some remaining largely unknown. Most widely circulated are two periodical publications, Arti musices (1969-) and the International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music (1970- ), both published semiannually by the Institute of Musicology at the Zagreb Academy of Music and both in their fourth decade of existence. Practically unknown are the Croatian Musicological Society series Muzikoloske studije/Studies in Musicology and Indices collectiorum musicarum tabulariorumque in Croatia, as well as the Muzikoloski zbornici/ Musicological Proceedings which publishes essays presented at international symposia on designated themes, organized by the society with some regularity.

It is a pity that the last named is not more widely circulated, for it avoids one of the main stumbling blocks of the earlier volumes of the Studies and Catalogues series, language inaccessibility. The Proceedings reflect the international participation at the symposia, and the papers offer valuable new insights challenging established scholarly opinions, reporting on research and investigations in a geographic area generally believed to have had little participation in the mainstream of music history. The volumes from these two series reviewed here take steps toward making Croatian musicological research more accessible to Western scholars unfamiliar with the language, the first by providing an English summary and the second through a bilingual presentation.

Miljenko Grgic's study of musical culture in the Split Cathedral is a carefully researched and thoroughly documented investigation of a significant cultural center of the Adriatic coastlands with roots in the ancient Roman Empire. (The heart of the old town—including the cathedral—is built literally into the remains of emperor Diocletian's palace [284-305 A.D.].) Although the author limited his investigations to a two-hundred-year period (1750s-1940s), his approach to the subject lays out a model adaptable—mutatis mutandum— to earlier stretches of the cathedral's musical history, documentable at least partially from the eleventh century. The treatment is admirably thorough, taking into account the broader cultural context of general and political history, related artistic activities in literature and theater, ecclesiastic and secular institutions, education and demographics—in short, placing music into the living social fabric of the period examined. Extensive archival resources, and contemporary and periodical literature provide the solid foundation for the detailed accounts whose thread is the unbroken line of twenty-six documented chapel masters from 1750 to the period just before Yugoslavia was...