Mikolaj Górecki, Giya Kancheli, Arvo Pärt, and Finnish composers such as Rautavaara and Sallinen have shown that contemporary music can be immediately appealing and emotionally moving, that tonality has not at all said everything. Milan Mihajloviæ definitely has his place on this list of prominent contemporary composers, and it is high time for him to receive due recognition from us in the West. Born in Belgrade, he began teaching in the field of music theory in the music department at the University of Belgrade in 1975, holding positions ranging from assistant to full professor. In 1998 he also began teaching in the field of composition. He was able to bring about a very successful internal musical dialogue between the discourse of the »Polish school« and the classicizing style in 1983 in his Notturni for String Quartet and Wind Quintet, in which richly interrelated nocturnal sound pictures are combined with hidden quotations. Mihajloviæ executed this feat through the practical use of avant-garde and classical compositional techniques rooted in the vertical structures of the 'Scriabin mode'. This musical concept for deriving a clear linear construction and skilled instrumentation from a personal expressive world characterizes all the works written by Mihajloviæ since the mid-1980s.