It is with great sadness that Magdalen College announces the death of Dr Bojan Bujić. Bojan was elected Fellow and Tutor in Music in 1978, and has remained an Emeritus Fellow since his retirement in 2005.
Bojan was born in Sarajevo, where he gained his first degrees in English Literature (1961) and Musicology (1963). He then came to Oxford as a graduate student, where he completed his DPhil on ‘Anglo-Italian Interactions in Fourteenth-Century Music’ (1967). After a brief spell back in Yugoslavia, he returned to the British Isles. Between 1969 and 1978 he served as Lecturer in Music at Reading University, before he was appointed University Lecturer (from 1997 Reader) at the Music Faculty in Oxford, in connection with his Tutorial Fellowship at Magdalen.
Bojan acted as a conduit of the intellectual culture of his ‘home’: Croatia, Dalmatia and the (former) Austro-Hungarian Empire. He was elected a corresponding member of Croatian Academy in 1997 and became a member of the Croatian Society of Composers.
Bojan’s mastery of languages, his intellectual sprezzatura, his wide-ranging interests and his commitment to learning marked him as a true ‘Renaissance man’. Following his mentor Egon Wellesz, who had introduced the rigorous academic standards of the ‘Viennese School’ to Oxford, Bojan straddled successfully the boundaries between Anglophone and Continental traditions.
The anthology Music in European Thought 1851–1912 (1987) has remained a reference source. His monograph on Arnold Schoenberg (2011) exhibited a deep understanding of the music and culture of Central Europe that had shaped the composer. In 2020 he published what came to be his opus ultimum, an incisive study of Arnold Schoenberg and Egon Wellesz: A Fraught Relationship (2020). Now out of print, a revised edition of this book is currently in preparation.
Although Bojan is primarily known as an expert on 20th-century modernism, he maintained an active research profile in humanism and Italian music of the 16th and early 17th centuries. As a young scholar in particular, he additionally promoted the performance of early music, especially through the ensemble Musica Rediviva (which he founded in Sarajevo in 1967) and as conductor of the Palestrina Chamber Choir at Reading.
Despite repeated health setbacks, Bojan has remained a regular presence at Magdalen, where he is fondly remembered as a congenial, erudite, and witty interlocutor. In 2023, the College and the Faculty celebrated his 85th birthday with a symposium on ‘Viennese modernism and its legacies’. Bojan will be deeply mourned and sorely missed.
Funeral arrangements to be announced at a later date. There will be a Memorial Service in the Chapel at Magdalen College in due course.
