BE AT A LOSS FOR WORDS ABOVE HER GRAVE AND FAITHFUL SILENCE

Abstract

At this year’s Music Biennale Zagreb, an oratorio in twelve scenes, Zilverstad (Silver City)/Srebrenica was performed. Written by a German composer born in Zagreb, Miro Dobrowolny, Zilverstad will add a biennial context to the programme Art-Politics, with its secondary programme segments, Process- Music and Music-Diversion. The political art of this biennial looks pleads for the remembrance of crimes. Sadly, there was no mention of the performance of Zilverstad in Bosnian- Herzegovinian public papers. One could perhaps take comfort in the fact that the performance is a compositional effort of little relevance, ranging from muddy minimalistic doubletalk, to more or less meaningful singing parts, to quotations from a Serbian folk song to which Dutch and Serbian soldiers danced. But if the people of Bosnia have any intention of fostering the rememberance of the Srebrenica pogrom, or more generally speaking, of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and truly care about its past, they must seek to leave behind their own Guernica or Scream, or their own quartet about the end of time, as did a former detainee of a nazi camp, a composer called Olivier Messiaen.