This piece was written as an attempt to reconcile the idea of sound as both a physical, material phenomenon and as something which can be moulded willfully by composers, performers and listeners into the communal event infused with meaning we know as music. In this sense I have conceived the piece as a sculpture (r)evolving through time as it moves between phases of suspension and agitation, mixing indeterminate elements with fixed points of reference as if we were viewing the morphing musical object from different angles within the unifying resonant space of the musical performance.

Sound Sculpture No. 1 (2013)

The inspiration for Stratus Rising came to me in early 2010 when my family and I stayed at a friend’s house in the Victorian alpine town of Warburton. The house sits on the slope of a big crescent hill, and one early morning I walked out onto the porch and witnessed something truly sublime: the green hill was covered in wispy strands of white clouds slowly climbing their way up the slope to return back to the sky. Moments after seeing this magical sight I sat at my friend’s piano and began writing this composition, though it was not until April 2011 that I finished the work. What I have tried to create here is a piece of music which embodies the dynamic nature of this vision and that region, one which is at times sublimely peaceful against the backdrop of its still, low-lying clouds, and at others equally tumultuous when these very same clouds turn into powerful storms.

Stratus Rising (2011)

I/O explores multiple approaches to the sounds possible on the piano via electronic manipulation. Nothing is external; every element of the work originates in the analogue sounds made on the disklavier, a sort of modern, digitally-enabled version of the player piano. 

I/O (2014)

I have conceived the piece as being organised around several key pitches which encircle the work's sonic geography like the lines of latitude which run around the earth. The opening explosively presents these boundaries, and from there the music expands and contracts as bands of pitch space anchored to these lines, a constant tuning and re-tuning of the orchestra between these horizontal planes of sound. Within this shifting, liminal sound-world different instrumental colours and combinations emerge and recede before the whole booming potential of the orchestra is finally gathered and pours out in a mass of sound which instantly vanishes into the long metal dissolve that concludes the piece.

Performed by the University of Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and conducted by Fabian Russell

Restless Parallels (2016)

In writing this work, I have attempted to channel the restless exuberance of the creative process itself, the constant to and fro of a mind at work in producing, listening to and studying its own utterances. To this end, the music is marked by a continual process of defining itself, one which does not occur through the gradual, linear development of harmonic material so much as through the circular juxtaposition of a relatively static pitch space with itself in its various configurations. Proceeding from the opening explosive enunciation of this pitch space, the music continually motions through its own internal possibilities and tensions in gestural cycles of fervour and rest, articulating its identity in the ecstasy of movement and dance rather than in the attainment of arrival and resolution, imbuing the ending with a strange sense of persistence and suspension rather than definite closure.

Performed by Plexus:
Monica Curro (violin)
Philip Arkinstall (clarinet)
Stefan Cassomenos (piano)

These Twinkling States of Mind (2016)

The aria from the Yu Opera 'Hua Mulan' that my work 'Festivities of Fragment' is based on.

在线热搜（华语）系列129

"Brother Liu is Prejudiced Against Women" from Hua Mulan

The work is an ecstatic and fervent exploration of the aria "Brother Liu is Prejudiced Against Women” from the Yu Opera 'Hua Mulan'. Through extension and fragmentation, the aria becomes a musical frame upon which my music seeks out interaction between the soloist as individual and the orchestra as mass. What begins in media res with a monolithic orchestral eruption based on an isolated cadential motive from the aria gradually crystallises into a joyous dance between several living “fragments": the pipa, a string quartet drawn from within the orchestra, the twinkling quintet of the harp and the four percussionists, and ultimately the orchestra itself. The music journeys through the prism of the entire aria from beginning to end, living fragments dispersed within the musical fragments, all mutually constituting one another towards a climactic, scintillating and harmonious union.

Conductor: Zhang Liang
Pipa: Xu Jiaxin
Orchestra: Shanghai Philharmonic Orchestra

Written for the 2017 'Hearing China' festival

Festivities Of Fragment (2017)

A re-imagining of Purcell's famous aria 'Dido's Lament', my work extends the original through layers of itself operating at different levels of temporal stretching and compression to create a new lament whose tragic elements are intensified in the unleashed multiplicity and warping undulations of the human voice.

…but ah, forget our fate

The piece looks at the idea of human identity as a constantly proliferating multitude, an (in)balance of different elements pushing and pulling a person in different directions. The performer plays solo and yet speaks in an internal monologue while fantasies of the single line’s multiplication and modification dance unpredictably around the installation. The three elements morph, shape and transform each other in creating the fundamental flux and drama of a constituted subject, reflected publicly in the spatial orientation of the sound, originally for an 18-channel presentation on special "sound-dice” speakers and presented here in a stereo mix.

Anatomies of the Self (2020)

Composer and pianist from currently based in Berlin. Contact me at e.simic.prosic@gmail.com

Some longer projects and videos of performances can be found at my YouTube channel through the link below.

Eli Simic-Prosic

Popular tracks