"Aesthetics of Music"

The international conference “Aesthetics of Music” was held for the third time as part of Nišville Jazz Festival from August 15 until August 17, 2025, in Niš, Serbia. In collaboration with the Nišville Foundation, the conference was organized by the Cultural Club “Prejaka reč”, an association dedicated to promoting artistic and cultural advancement.

This interdisciplinary event, focusing on music, brought together scholars and professionals from diverse fields—philosophers, musicologists, ethnomusicologists, art theorists, music journalists, and other music researchers from Finland, Poland, Slovenia, Croatia, and Serbia.

The conference was held at the historic Officer’s Club (Serbian: Oficirski dom) (Address: Orlovića Pavla 28A, Niš, Serbia).

2025 edition of the conference featured a special art exhibition, curated by the art collective Kvadar from Zagreb (Croatia). The exhibition by the artist Maja Perak named “S ljubavlju iz…” (With Love From...) was opened on the first conference day (August 15, 2025) at 15:30.

The special guests of this year’s conference included Max Ryynänen, professor at Aalto University in Finland, as well as Ewa Schreiber and Piotr Podlipniak, professors at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań (Poland). The Cultural Club “Prejaka reč” has already brought one of our special guests to Niš. In 2024, Max Ryynänen delivered a lecture “Pioneers, Postmodernisms, and Aesthetic Experience: A Brief History of Aesthetic Approaches to Rap” at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Niš, The full recording of this lecture is available here:

The conference program is curated by Dušan Milenković, an assistant professor at the Faculty of Philosophy in Niš, founding member and the Steering Committee member of the European Network for the Philosophy of Music, and one of the founders of the Cultural Club “Prejaka reč”.

The three-day conference was conducted in English and featured three presentations each day, with each presentation lasting 30 minutes followed by a 20-minute discussion period.

As the only yearly conference dedicated to the aesthetics of music in the whole Balkan region, “Aesthetics of Music” is recognized by the European Network for the Philosophy of Music. The conference was announced on the official website of the ENPM.

Announcements

Please find the complete conference schedule below.

2025 Conference program

Download the full program here.

Friday, August 15, 2025

15:30 Conference and Art Exhibition Opening
The Exhibition „S ljubavlju iz…” of the artist Maja Perak (Art collective Kvadar, Croatia) Dušan Milenković and the members of the art collective Kvadar (Croatia)

16:00–16:30 Bojana Radovanović (Serbia) – The Aesthetics of Extreme Voice
Discussion (20 min)
Break (10 min)

17:00–17:30 Max Ryynänen (Finland) – Noisy (Anti)Revolutions: Notes on Critical Theory (Adorno, Benjamin) and the Aesthetic Nature of Metal Music
Discussion (20 min)
Break (10 min)

18:00–18:30 Jelena Mladenović (Serbia) – Towards the Poetics of Serbian Rock Poetry
Discussion (20 min)

Saturday, August 16, 2025

16:00–16:30 Ana Hofman (Slovenia) – Music on the Tracks: The Railway as a Cultural Agent
Discussion (20 min)
Break (10 min)

17:00–17:30 Ewa Schreiber (Poland) – Back to Nature, Back to Sound. The Concept of Nature in the Discourse of Contemporary Composers
Discussion (20 min)
Break (10 min)

18:00–18:30 Bojan Blagojević (Serbia) – The Artificial Unconscious – The Composers’ Search for a New and Improved Id
Discussion (20 min)

Sunday, August 17, 2025

16:00–16:30 Mihailo Antović (Serbia) – From Apparent Diversity to Underlying Connections: Meta-Schemas and Multilevel Grounding in Interpretations of an Operatic Motif
Discussion (20 min)
Break (10 min)

17:00–17:30 Piotr Podlipniak (Poland) – Contemporary Theories on the Origins of Music: Some Implications for Music Philosophy
Discussion (20 min)
Break (10 min)

18:00–18:30 Saša Drach (Croatia) – The Art of Writing Music Biographies (a discussion)
Discussion (20 min)
Closing discussion

Photos from the 2025 edition of the conference are available here:

Fotografije sa internacionalne konferencije “Estetika muzike” 2025

Learn more about our 2025 participants:

Bojana Radovanović Šuput, musicologist and art theorist, research associate at the Institute of Musicology of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts (SASA). She earned her PhD at the Faculty of Music in Belgrade, focusing on the relationship between voice and vocal technique and new technologies in contemporary art and popular music. Her research areas include contemporary music and art, voice, metal music, art and media, as well as research methodologies in art, music, and musicology. She has published three monographs and has been part of editorial teams for several collections of papers. In recent years, she has devoted special attention to the work of Dragutin Gostuški, organizing scholarly conferences and events, working on reissues of his comparative-aesthetic and musicological writings, as well as the edited volume The Oblique Angle of Dragutin Gostuški (2024). She is a member of the International Society for Metal Music Studies (ISMMS) and the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM). She is co-founder of the Association for the Preservation, Research, and Promotion of Music “Serbian Composers,” the Belgrade Association for the Study of Popular Music, as well as co-founder and editor-in-chief of the scholarly journal INSAM Journal of Contemporary Music, Art and Technology (Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina). bojana.radovanovic@music.sanu.ac.rs

Max Ryynänen is Principal Lecturer (equivalent of Reader in the UK, but based on pedagogical merits) in Theory of Visual Culture at Aalto University Finland, and adjunct professor of aesthetics at the universities of Helsinki, Jyväskylä, and Eastern Finland. He is the ex president of the Finnish Society of Aesthetics, Finland’s member of the board in the Nordic Society of Aesthetics, and the Chair of the Society for Dialogical Aesthetics. Ryynänen’s books are based on an extended way of using aesthetics and mingling with cultural studies, film studies, and idea history. The methodological outreach is global, ranging from American pragmatism to Indian philosophy, and phenomenology/hermeneutics to Japanese aesthetics. In music, he has studied e.g. kitsch and rap. Ryynänen’s book On the Philosophy of Central European Art: A History of an Institution and Its Global Competitors (Lexington Books, 2020) studied in a class, gender and ethnicity sensitive way the history of the art system, and what kind of cultural systems it overshadowed globally. A Philosophy of Cultural Scenes in Art and Popular Culture (written with Jozef Kovalcik; Routledge, 2023) is an inquiry into the role of art scenes and cultural scenes of various kinds, and their cultural nature. Currently, Ryynänen works on a book on the aesthetics of martial arts – where music is included as well. For more, see homepage: http://maxryynanen.net

Jelena S. Mladenović (Kruševac, 1984) is an assistant professor at the Department of Serbian Studies, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Niš, where she graduated and received her PhD degree. She is the author of the monograph From the Devil’s Friend to the Secret Monk – Carnival and Religion in the Poetry of Novica Tadić (2022), for which she received the “Đorđe Jovanović” Award. She has edited the following books: Branko Miljković, Collected Works / Poems II (2017), poems from periodicals and manuscripts; Josip Bersa, Dubrovnik Pictures and Occasions 1800‒1880, 1‒2 (2021); Momčilo Nastasijević, Five Lyrical Circles (2023); Vladislav Petković Dis, Drowned Souls (2024), as well as the collections of scientific papers Women, War, Art (2015) and Contemporary Philological Studies of Young Researchers 2 (2024). She was a participant in numerous scientific conferences in the country and abroad. She is also known as the author of the dozens of studies and essays published in scientific journals and collections, as well as literary critical reviews of contemporary Serbian literature books. She was a member of the jury for the “Branko Miljković”, “Meša Selimović”, “Ramonda Serbika”, “Đorđe Jovanović” awards and for the Dis Award. She edited the literary criticism column in the journal Gradina. She is the director of the Center for Contemporary Philological Studies of Young Researchers at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Niš and a member of the presidency of the Society of Writers and Literary Translators of Niš.

Ana Hofman is a senior research associate at the Institute of Culture and Memory Studies of the Research Centre of Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts in Ljubljana. Her work moves through the sonic and musical landscapes of socialist and post-socialist worlds, listening for the echoes of collective life—its songs, affects, and the overlapping struggles. Her research brings together memory, activism, and everyday musical engagement, exploring how cultural practices persist and transform under the weight of post-socialist transformation and neoliberal exhaustion. She is the author of three monographs—Staging Socialist Femininity: Gender Politics and Folklore Performances in Serbia (2011) and Music, Affect, Politics: New Lives of Partisan Songs in Slovenia (2015). Her latest book, Socialism Now: Singing Activism after Yugoslavia (Oxford University Press, 2025), explores strategic amateurism, the politics of leisure, and the musical afterlives of socialism after Yugoslavia.

Ewa Schreiber, Assistant Professor in the Institute of Musicology of Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań (Poland) and Assistant Dean for Academic Affairs at the Faculty of Art Studies. Her main research interests are the aesthetics of music, sociology of music and the musical thought of contemporary composers (György Ligeti, Witold Lutosławski, Helmut Lachenmann and Jonathan Harvey among others). She published her monograph Muzyka i metafora. Koncepcje kompozytorskie Pierre’a Schaeffera, Raymonda Murraya Schafera i Gérarda Griseya [Music and metaphor: the compositional thought of Pierre Schaeffer, Raymond Murray Schafer and Gérard Grisey] (2012) and, together with Karolina Golinowska, is co-author of the book Przeobrażenia pamięci, przeobrażenia kanonu. Historie muzyki w kręgu współczesnych dyskursów [Transformations of memory, transformations of the canon. Histories of music within contemporary discourses] (2019). Her articles were published among others in „International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music”, “Musicology Today”, “Muzikologija”, “Studia Musicologica”, “Mitteilungen der Paul Sacher Stiftung” and “Musik-Konzepte”.

Bojan Blagojević (1980), assistant professor at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Niš, Serbia. His fields of interest include existential philosophy, history of ethics, and metaphilosophy. He is the author of the book “Kierkegaard on the Individual and Community” (“Kjerkegor o pojedincu i zajednici”). Blagojević has published numerous scientific articles in the field of ethics, aesthetics, and contemporary philosophy, including “Marx on the Need for Art: Art between Political Economy and Self-Determination”, “Aestheticism and Decontextualization”, and “Indirect Communication as a Language-Game: Kierkegaard Through a Late-Wittgensteinian Lens”.

Dušan Milenković is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Niš. Milenković is one of the founding members and a Steering Committee Member at the European Network for the Philosophy of Music (ENPM). With Max Ryynänen, he is the editor of the book series „Palgrave Studies in the Philosophy of Popular Culture“ for Palgrave Macmillan (Springer). Since 2021, he is a Board Member at the Serbian Association for Aesthetics. Milenković is a Guest Editor of a 2024 volume on Aesthetics of Music in Polish journal Res Facta Nova (published by the The Institute of Musicology at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań), a Guest Editor of a 2025 volume on Philosophy of Music in Croatian journal „Filozofska istraživanja“ (published by the Croatian Philosophical Society), and the Editoral Board Member for the journals Sociological Annual and Philosophical Review (published by the University of Niš). His main interests include aesthetics of music, history of aesthetics, pragmatism, and contemporary American aesthetics. At the University of Niš, he is conducting courses on aesthetics, history of aesthetics, aesthetics of music, and aesthetics and popular culture. Milenković is a team member of the Nišville jazz festival since 2009 and one of the founders of the Cultural Club „Prejaka reč“.

The conference “Aesthetics of Music” is organized with the assistance of our team members from the Aesthetics Section of the Cultural Club. Team members include Đurica Stojanović, Lazar Miletić, Aleksa Pavlović, and Mirjana Mitrović.

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Find out more about previous editions of the conference

2024

The international conference “Aesthetics of Music” 2024 took place for the second time as part of the official program of Nišville Jazz Festival. The conference was held from August 16 until August 18 2025 in Niš, Serbia.

Special guests of the 2024 edition of the conference included Nemesio G. C. Puy, a Spanish philosopher specializing in the ontology of music and the current coordinator of the European Network for the Philosophy of Music (ENPM), and Małgorzata Szyszkowska, a Polish aesthetician renowned for her expertise in phenomenological aesthetics and the works of Roman Ingarden.

Conference program:

16.08. (15:30 – 19:00)

• Jasna Jovićević (Serbia/South Africa) – Readings of Female Identity in Free Jazz: Case Study
• Małgorzata A. Szyszkowska (Poland) – Roman Ingarden’s philosophy of music: imagined communities
• Bojan Blagojević (Serbia) – I’ll be Bach: can musical machines teach us a thing or two about being human
• Jan Hoozee (Belgium) – Ghent Festivities (Ghent, Belgium): city festival with 1.7 million visitors during 10 days – yet for us (Trefpunt) a project of inclusion

17.08. (15:30 – 19:00)

• Ana Hofman (Slovenia) – Musical Amateurism Revisited
• Nemesio G. C. Puy (Spain) – Authenticity in Popular and Classical Music: a Philosophical and Empirical Approach
• Marija Dinov (Serbia) – Performance Practice as a Research Tool in Musicology
• Tin Bačun (Croatia) – Soundscapes of Trance: Music in Hotline Miami

18.08. (15:30 – 19:00)

• Bojana Radovanović (Serbia) – The Aesthetics of Ugliness: Sound and Image of Extreme Metal Music
• Adriana Sabo (Serbia/Slovenia) – Producing the Empowered Balkan Woman in Senidah’s “Dva Prsta”
• Aleksander Brunka (Poland) – Aesthetic problems in the discourse on the auto-tune
• Aleksa Pavlović (Serbia) – The Concept of Persona: Reflections on the Importance of Context in Evaluating Performances

2024 Conference Gallery:

The participants:

Jasna Jovićević, Ph.D. (Serbia/South Africa) is a distinguished musician, composer, and researcher who has performed at major festivals across Europe, the USA, and Canada. Jasna earned her degree in Jazz Saxophone Performance and Teaching from the Franz Liszt Music Academy in Budapest, followed by an MA in Music Composition from York University in Toronto, and a PhD in Arts and Media from Singidunum University in Belgrade. She has garnered international recognition through her participation in prestigious Arts & Science projects like Ars Electronica, Artist-in-Residences in New York and San Francisco, and various music competitions. In 2023, she published the acclaimed and award-winning monograph “Good Morning Jazzwomen” (Orion Art Books). Starting in 2024, she serves as an Adjunct Research Associate at Tshwane University of Technology Arts Campus in Pretoria, South Africa. Her discography includes seven solo albums and numerous collaborations.

Małgorzata A. Szyszkowska (Poland) graduated from the Ph.D. program in philosophy in 2000 and in 2018 received a habilitation in Human Sciences. After working as a research fellow at the Music Department of Cardiff University in the UK (2001-2003) she has worked as an academic lecturer at the University of Warsaw (2004-2019) and then at the Chopin University of Music (2019-2022). In 2023 she has been a project coordinator for the Welcome Centre and a specialist for the international exchange of students and staff in a hybrid environment at the Graduate School for Social Research at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology PAN. She is currently an expert for graduate exams at the Chopin University of Music and teaches aesthetics at the Academy of Economic and Human Sciences (2023-2024). Her interests span across everyday aesthetics, the aesthetic experience, philosophical writings of Roman Ingarden, Theodor W. Adorno, Edmund Gurney, and John Dewey, phenomenology of listening, cultural axiology, and the philosophy of music. She has recently concluded a project on music no 2016/23/B/HS1/02325 financed by the National Center of Science and works on EU special project Communities and Artistic Participation in Hybrid Environment CAPHE. She is an author of “Wsłuchując się w muzykę. Studia z fenomenologii słuchania” (2017) and many other articles and book chapters.

Bojan Blagojević (Serbia) (1980), assistant professor at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Niš, Serbia. His fields of interest include existential philosophy, history of ethics, and metaphilosophy. He is the author of the book “Kierkegaard on the Individual and Community” (“Kjerkegor o pojedincu i zajednici”). Blagojević has published numerous scientific articles in the field of ethics, aesthetics, and contemporary philosophy, including “Marx on the Need for Art: Art between Political Economy and Self-Determination”, “Aestheticism and Decontextualization”, and “Indirect Communication as a Language-Game: Kierkegaard Through a Late-Wittgensteinian Lens”.

Jan Hoozee (Belgium) is the artistic coordinator of the core organizer of the Ghent Festivities. Trefpunt is an organization created in 1962 by folk singer/sculptor Walter De Buck as a gallery and macrobiotic restaurant. In 1970 he re-invented the dying Ghent Festivities in front of his venue, as a hippie, left-wing, and rebellious 10-day festival, one of the first of its kind in Belgium. It comprised rock, jazz, folk, and world music from the start, connecting with growing minorities in the city. More than 50 years later Trefpunt is still the defender of a diverse programmation in one of the biggest city festivals of Europe, that has become more and more commercial and pure entertainment. On 6 stages Trefpunt programs world music, folk, jazz, rock, pop, urban, circus, street theatre, dance, workshops, debates, literature, and much more … Jan Hoozee studied cultural anthropology and management. He has been an amateur musician and a DJ and radio producer for decades. He coordinated Zephyrus Records for 10 years before continuing his approach towards culture and society under the wings of Trefpunt. His dada? Connection people through music and culture. Trefpunt is also the coordinator of the Sounds Of Europe, a network of 13 festivals in Europe, exchanging artists thanks to support from Creative Europe.

Ana Hofman (Slovenia) is an ethnomusicologist and anthropologist. She is interested in music, sound and politics in socialist and post-socialist societies, with an emphasis on memory, affect and activism. In her current project focused on post-Yugoslav activist choirs, she uses both archival and ethnographic methods to examine the politics of memorializations of socialism after Yugoslavia. She has published two monographs: Staging Socialist Femininity: Gender Politics and Folklore Performances in Serbia (Brill, 2011) and Music, Affect, Politics: New Lives of Partisan Songs in Slovenia (ZRC 2015), translated into Serbian as New Lives of Partisan Songs (Biblioteka XX vek, 2016). She is a lecturer at ZRC SAZU Postgraduate School, Ljubljana. In Winter semester 2017 she was a visiting lecturer at the University of Performing Arts, Graz, Austria while in Summer semester 2018 she was a Postdoctoral Fulbright Fellow at the Graduate School of City University of New York. She was a visiting fellow at the School of Music, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Visiting Research Fellow, Centre for Southeastern European Studies, University of Graz, Austria; Visiting researcher at the Russian, East European, and Eurasian Center for Balkan studies, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign; Visiting Research Fellow at New Europe College, Bucharest, Romania,  Max Plank Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle, Germany and the Department of Music, University of Chicago. She has received the Danubius Mid-Career Award  by the Austrian Ministry of Education, Science and Research and the Institute for Central Europe and Danube Region in 2018.

Nemesio G. C. Puy (Spain) (born in Lisbon, 1987) is a Ramón y Cajal postdoctoral fellow at the Faculty of Philosophy of the Complutense University of Madrid, the main coordinator of the European Network for the Philosophy of Music and a member of the Complutense Institute for Musical Sciences. His main interests are in the philosophy of music, aesthetics, ontology and metaontology, specially focusing on the phenomenon of musical versions, authenticity, creativity and interpretation. His outputs have been published in top academic journals like the Australasian Journal of Philosophy, the Philosophical Quarterly, the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Synthese, or Philosophical Psychology, and awarded with the John Fisher Prize by the American Society for Aesthetics (2019) and with the Fabian Dorsch Prize by the European Society for Aesthetics (2021). His also a co-principal investigator, along with Paloma Atencia Linares, of the project ‘The grounds of artistic rights and the limits of appropriation’. Nemesio has also developed a parallel career as a French horn player, having recorded 6 albums of classical and popular music, and has performed with several orchestras, like the Malaga Symphony Orchestra, Granada City Orchestra, BTT Badenwailer and Cambridge University Symphony Orchestra. With the Proemium Metals Brass Quintet he has been awarded with Second Prize of the Burke & Bagley Competition (USA 2017), the first prize of the Mediterranean Brass Music Festival Competition (Spain 2013), and has been finalist of the Jan Koetsier Competition (Music Conservatory of Munich and Bavarian Radio Orchestra) in 2014 and 2016, respectively.

Marija Dinov (Serbia) (1980) is a pianist with a specific and refined artistic sensibility. She completed her piano studies at the Faculty of Arts in Niš (2003). During her studies, she was one of the best students at the University of Niš, which was recognized by the scholarship from the Embassy of the Kingdom of Norway, and especially by the University Charter awarded to her as the best student of the Faculty of Arts in her generation. After graduation, she attended postgraduate piano studies at the National Music Academy in Sofia, as a scholarship holder of the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Bulgaria. There she received her Master’s degree (2006), having defended her MA thesis entitled “Peculiarities of musical language in the piano works of Claude Debussy”. During her postgraduate studies, she was a scholarship holder of the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Bulgaria. Her doctoral thesis, entitled “Studies of Performing Arts: Performativity and the Function of Body Gesture in Pianism”, was defended in 2019 at the University of Arts in Belgrade, in the interdisciplinary studies of art theory and media. For fifteen years (2005-2019) Marija Dinov worked as a teaching assistant at the Department of Piano of the Faculty of Arts in Niš, and from July 2024, she is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Arts.

Tin Bačun (Croatia) (univ. mag. litt. comp.) was born on December 30, 1994, in Zagreb, where he graduated in Comparative Literature from the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences. He is the president of the NGO “Knowledge Warehouse,” and has several years of experience as a radio announcer and film worker. With the film “Clerical Error,” he participated in the 12th ZagrebDOX. Since 2018, he has been an external associate for the Croatian Film Chronicle, and he is currently working as the chief editor of a monograph on Lukas Nola.

Bojana Radovanović (Serbia), musicologist and art theorist, is a research associate at the Institute of Musicology, Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts. She obtained her Ph.D. at the Department of Musicology, Faculty of Music, University of Arts in Belgrade, studying the relations of voice to vocal technique and new technologies in contemporary art and popular music. Her research interests include contemporary music and art, voice, metal music, art and media, and transdisciplinary research. She has published three books, and co-edited one collective monograph and a posthumous collection of papers by esteemed Prof. Vesna Mikić. She is a co-founder of the Association for Preservation, Research and Promotion of Music ‘Serbian Composers’, Association for the Study of Popular Music from Belgrade, and a co-founder and editor-in-chief of the scientific journal INSAM Journal of Contemporary Music, Art and Technology published in Sarajevo.

Adriana Sabo (Serbia/Slovenia) (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2552-1457) is a PhD candidate at the Postgraduate School ZRC SAZU in Ljubljana, Slovenia. She was a PhD candidate at the Department of Musicology, Faculty of Music in Belgrade (2014 – 2020), and was employed as a Junior Researcher and a Research Associate at the same institution. She holds master’s degrees in musicology (2012) and gender studies (2015). She is a member of the Serbian Musicological Society, and the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, and a former contributor to the Center for Popular Music Research (Belgrade). She is one of the founders of the Association for the Study of Popular Music based in Belgrade.

Aleksander Brunka (Poland) is a second-degree student in the Institute of Musicology in the University of Warsaw. In 2023 he defended his bachelor degree thesis, called Deathcore as a genre and style between 2003 and 2007. He has participated in numerous conferences in Poland and abroad. He co-organized an international conference Music on the periphery of aesthetics, held in June 2024 at the University of Warsaw. His first publications: Can Black Metal Be Pink? Discussion of inappropriateness of the album Sunbather by Deafheaven in selected reviews and Characteristics of deathcore as a genre in the early stages of the phenomenon (until 2007) will be published in 2024. His master degree thesis will be focusing on the reception of the auto-tune. His main scientific interests are the social contexts of popular music. 

Aleksa Pavlović (Serbia) is an undergraduate student of Philosophy in Niš (Serbia), and also International Politics in Milan (Italy). Aesthetics is one of his primary interests, with an emphasis on music. Aleksa speaks five languages and has worked and lived in Toronto, Milan, and Barcelona. In addition to philosophy, he is also an avid athlete – he has recently run the Belgrade Marathon, has a UEFA C coaching license, and has worked as a tutor, football referee, and coach.

The organizer:

Dusan Milenkovic (1991) https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1860-5502 is an assistant professor at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Niš (Serbia). He defended his Ph.D. “The Role of Form in Aesthetics of Popular Music” at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Novi Sad (Serbia) in 2023. Milenkovic is one of the founding members and a member of the Steering Committee of the European Network for the Philosophy of Music, as well as a member of the Steering Committee of the Serbian Association for Aesthetics. He is a member of the International Advisory Board for the Finnish international journal Popular Inquiry, a member of the Editorial Board of Serbian Sociological Annual Journal, and a team member of the Nisville Jazz Festival organization. Milenković is the author of more than 20 scientific articles. At the University of Niš, he conducts courses on aesthetics, history of aesthetics, aesthetics and popular art, aesthetics of music, and pragmatist philosophy. He is one of the founders of the Cultural Club “Prejaka reč”, the organizer of the conference “Aesthetics of Music”.

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2023

The program of the 2023 conference:

10.08. (PROGRAM IN ENGLISH)

15:20-15:30 Opening words – the director of the festival Ivan Blagojević and the conference organizer Dušan Milenković

15:30-16:00 Krzysztof Guczalski (Krakow, Poland) – “On two paradigms of emotion in music”
Discussion (10 minutes)
16:10-16:40 Mihailo Antović (Niš, Serbia) – “From Beethoven to Keith Jarrett: Multilevel Grounding of Musical Meaning”
Discussion (10 minutes)

Coffee break (15 minutes)

17:05-17:35 Ana Hofman (Ljubljana, Slovenia) – “Music and Activism:The Post-Yugoslav reflections”
Discussion (10 minutes)
17:45-18:15 Rastislav Dinić (Niš, Serbia) – “Metallica’s “One”: Heavy Metal as Philosophy”
Discussion (10 minutes)
18:25-18:55 Dušan Milenković (Niš, Serbia) – “Should there be an aesthetics of world music?”
Discussion (10 minutes)

General discussion (15 minutes)

11.08. (PROGRAM IN ENGLISH)

16:00-16:30 Ivar Roban Križić (Vienna, Austria) – “Performative Probing: Reflections on Improvisation, Theory, and Artistic Research”
Discussion (10 minutes)
16:40-17:10 Matija Vigato (Zagreb, Croatia) – “Inner Music as a Metaphysical Problem”
Discussion (10 minutes)

Coffee break (15 minutes)

17:35-18:05 Jan Defrančeski (Zagreb, Croatia) – “On the Musical Structure of Nature: From Aesthetic Experience to Environmental Ethics”
Discussion (10 minutes)
18:15-18:45 Bojan Blagojević (Niš, Serbia) – “What is it like to be Music?”
Discussion (10 minutes)

General discussion (15 minutes)

12.08. (PROGRAM IN SERBIAN)

16:00-16:30 Dragan Žunić (Niš, Srbija) – “Estetsko nagoveštavanje smisla u muzici”
Discussion (10 minutes)
16:40-17:10 Đurica Stojanović (Niš, Srbija) – “Muzika i građanska neposlušnost”
Discussion (10 minutes)
17:20-17:50 Miloš Jovanović (Niš, Srbija) – “Popularno pravoslavlje: muzika i kulturna hegemonija u Srbiji”
Discussion (10 minutes)

General discussion (15 minutes)

Coffee break (15 minutes)

18:30 – 19:00 Melanija Pović Jagarinec (Zagreb, Hrvatska) – Promocija emisije “Svijet jazza” na Hrvatskoj radio-televiziji (HRT)

The 2023 conference gallery: