condition (record/cover): NM / EX- (minimal sticker removal residue and light ring wear on front)

Marko Ruždjak (1946-2012) studied clarinet and composition at the Zagreb Academy of Music - his teacher the composer Milo Cipra - before going to Paris to work with Ivo Malec and Pierre Schaeffer, and to Cologne to study with Milko Kelemen. This particular formation - Zagreb, Paris (musique concrète and the GRM tradition), Cologne (post-Darmstadt) - placed him at the intersection of the French and German streams of European new music, filtered through Croatian sensibility. He returned to Zagreb to teach at the Academy, becoming one of the central figures of the next generation of Croatian composition.

This LP, issued by Jugoton in 1979 as part of their Contemporary Croatian Composers series, presents four works that span his early output. Trois Chansons de Geste, for baritone, orchestra, and magnetic tape, brings together the French concert-music tradition and electroacoustic resources; the baritone soloist is Vladimir Ruždjak, the composer's father, a celebrated interpreter of the Yugoslav art song. Yours Sincerely, for clarinet alone, reflects his primary instrument and its extended possibilities. Musette, for wind trio, draws on a French baroque form turned inside out. Klasični Vrt (Classical Garden), for string quartet, completes the set with the most concentrated formal statement.

The LP belongs to a series that documented Croatian new music during the 1970s and early 1980s - a modest archive of a scene that remained almost entirely invisible outside Yugoslavia. The want-to-have ratio tells the usual story. Original 1979 pressing.