My father, Bojan Bujić, who has died aged 86, was a musicologist and academic whose life was shaped by the conflicts of 20th-century Europe.
Born in Sarajevo (then in Yugoslavia), he was the only child of Zorislava (nee Kovačević) and Branko, an economist and journalist. Bojan’s earliest memories were of life under German occupation after the invasion of Yugoslavia in 1941, and most notably of his father’s arrest at the family home. As a former member of the Communist party, Branko’s name appeared on lists of prominent anti-fascists, and he was deported to one of the region’s concentration camps, where he was executed.
As a youth, Bojan went to the Muška Gimnazija school in Sarajevo while also learning the violin at the city’s Srednja Muzička college. He first visited the UK in 1959 for an international youth camp in Pembrokeshire. There he developed lifelong friendships and a desire to move permanently to Britain, partly fuelled by the vagaries of life in postwar communist Yugoslavia, where he felt his freedom of thought and speech were being curtailed.
After completing his studies in English literature and musicology at Sarajevo University, Bojan returned to Britain under the mentorship of the academic and composer Egon Wellesz, who introduced him to Lincoln College, Oxford, and persuaded the college to support him financially from 1963 to 1967 while he studied for a doctorate. Both Wellesz, an Austrian Jewish refugee, and Wellesz’s tutor in Vienna, Arnold Schoenberg, would later become the subjects of two of Bojan’s published biographical works.
After a brief spell back in Yugoslavia, from 1969 onwards Bojan worked as a lecturer in music at the University of Reading, before moving in 1979 to become a lecturer (later reader) at the music faculty of the University of Oxford, in connection with his tutorial fellowship at Magdalen College. His understanding of the cultural and political landscape of Europe was central to his research specialisms, with his book Music in European Thought (1988) becoming a key reference text on the aesthetics of music.
Bojan’s love of languages made him a skilled communicator who never missed an opportunity to practise either his fluent Italian or one of the many other European tongues he had picked up.
Despite joking that he was “more British” than his English wife and children on account of having sworn allegiance to the crown when receiving British citizenship, he was happiest on the island of Hvar in Croatia. He had spent childhood holidays there, and it remained his spiritual home. For Bojan, sailing small boats in the island’s bay of Stari Grad remained a steadfast joy from boyhood until his 80s – symbolising the freedom he found away from the ordeal of his early years.
While at Reading University Bojan met Alison Warwick, a piano teacher, and they married in 1979. She survives him, as do their children, Oliver and me, and his grandchildren, Flora and Elena.
