Cvjetko Rihtman

Cvjetko Rihtman (Rijeka, 1902 – Sarajevo, 1989) was a Bosnian musicologist and composer born in Croatia, a central figure in the ethnomusicology of former Yugoslavia. His name is linked above all to the systematic study of the popular music of Bosnia and Herzegovina, a territory whose traditional polyphony he was the first to study in a methodical way.

His training was European. He studied theory and composition at the conservatories of Leipzig and Prague, with Křička and Metod Doležil, and then composition and musicology at the Schola Cantorum in Paris, under d'Indy and Gastoué. In Paris he worked for a time as an organist and choir director. On his return to Yugoslavia he served as choirmaster in Sarajevo and taught at a teacher training college. Between 1946 and 1947 he directed the Sarajevo Opera and, in 1947, he founded the Institute of Folklore Studies at the Regional Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina, of which he was the first director.

From 1955 to 1974 he was professor of ethnomusicology at the Sarajevo Academy of Music. He became a member of the Academy of Sciences and Arts of Bosnia and Herzegovina. He worked as director, teacher and administrator, but his greatest contribution was as a researcher. On his numerous field trips he recorded more than 7,000 folk songs, and he assembled a notable collection of magnetic tapes and transcriptions in the musicology department of the Sarajevo Academy.

His written output is extensive. He dealt with folk polyphony, traditional instruments such as the gusle, the music of specific localities such as Neum, Imljani and Lepenica, and questions of Slavic liturgical chant. He also made a decisive contribution to introducing modern techniques of transcription, classification and description into Yugoslav ethnomusicology. As a composer, his music shows a strong influence of the popular idiom.

His legacy endures in the collections he assembled and in the method he helped establish. For further details on his life, the tribute volume Zbornik radova u čast akademika Cvjetka Rihtmana, edited by B. Čović and published in Sarajevo in 1986, may be consulted.