Death of Dr Bojan Bujić

It is with great sadness that we announce the death of alumnus Dr Bojan Bujić (1963, DPhil Music) who was an Emeritus Fellow of Magdalen College. He was a graduate student at Lincoln and closely associated with Egon Wellesz, our distinguished Fellow in Music from the 1930s to the 1960s. He will be sorely missed.

Our former Rector, Professor Henry Woudhuysen, said, "The news of Bojan's death will sadden his many friends and admirers in Oxford and the world of music. On his visits to the College, he was a kind and genial presence, as well as a direct link to our distinguished Fellow, Egon Wellesz. Just over a year ago, after he and his wife, Alison, had been to dinner at Lincoln, he wrote of the College, "it has been such a constant in my life during the past sixty years and every time I am there I feel at home". We send our deepest sympathies to his wife on her great loss.

Professor Christian Leitmeir, Fellow in Music at Magdalen College pays tribute to Bojan:

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.

You can read the full tribute HERE.

Funeral arrangements will be announced at a later date and there will be a Memorial Service in the Chapel at Magdalen College in due course.