interlocutor (2021) for piano quartet

interlocutor was written as a part of the 2021 RED NOTE New Music Festival for Left Coast Chamber Ensemble.

Performed April 2021 by Left Coast Chamber Ensemble
Anna Pressler, violin
Phyllis Kamrin, viola
Leighton Fong, cello
Allegra Chapman, piano

Image: "in my opinion" by @constantbageltherapy on instagram

interlocutor (2021) for piano quartet

PREMIERE of the STRING QUARTET on 11/28/2022 at the Belgrade Philharmonic Concert Hall. Recorded with iPhone.
STRING QUARTET:
Tijana Tana Milošević, Violin I
Ksenija Milošević, Violin II
Saša Mirković, viola
Nemanja Stanković, violoncello

Moonscape for string quartet draws inspiration from the stasis of lifeless images of the moon's surface, contrasting with the mysterious and magical influences of folklore and mythology of lunar deities. As the musical form of contrasting sections unfolds almost as a traditional rondo, sometimes having an improvisatory feel, the final section becomes a polyrhythmic dance.

Moonscape / Paesaggio Lunare / Месечев крајолик / Mesečev Krajolik

concerto for trumpet, harp, cello,
& orchestra c. 17-19 minutes

for the Sonder Trio &
Chicago Composer’s Orchestra, commissioned for their 10th anniversary
(recorded by Nick Broste, editing/mixing by the composer)

~

This piece started as an idea to create a work featuring the unique instrumental trio of trumpet, harp, and cello with orchestral, for a concert themed after “deserts”. But the desert that came to mind at that time wasn’t one from the natural world, but the mysterious barren landscape of Salvador Dali’s “Archeological Reminiscence of Millet's ‘Angelus’ ” (pictured below). Colossal figures taking up the land yet themselves turned to something elsewhere, it suggested an unfolding of awe and density and yet still clarity, to be understood from various angles of approach.

The presence of harp, and the tripartate nature of the trio further reinforced the idea of some kind of angel (the old weird kind that justifies saying “be not afraid”), and Walter Benjamin’s writing on the ‘angel of history’ came up. Glossing on Paul Klee’s “Angelus Novus” , Benjamin imagines a figure who sees history not as an unfolding of events, but a pile of debris gathering under the figure, who is violently propelled into the future by the ‘storm’ of progress, though “The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed.” It’s an enticing metaphor all around to adapt to musical form, which has a history yet breaks down into sound-images, not stories, per the quote up top.

So the piece carries this adaptation out, up to a point, in which the “angel” trio is propelled over the orchestral “landscape” dominated by the imposing approach of some great landmark shaping the field of the piece as a whole, with local regions of tonality, bitonality, timbral weathers, etc.

In its approach, the angel too, awakens the landscape, and its features shape the regions to, and get shaped in turn. This is where the second part of the title comes in: “genius loci”, the ‘spirit of place’ which tends to the place via these changes, in both cooperation and agonism with these changes being an inevitable form of progress. The angel would like to be beyond it all, as Benjamin supposes, but it is embedded already in that it would observe as debris--there is no position “outside” the landscape and its history, try as the trio might through its strides and flourishes.

Thus, thee distortions and energies intensify the ‘closer’ the trio gets to the ‘center’ of the piece, and in a cadenza, the most imposing sound-image-icon-landmark becomes ‘blasted out of time’ ala Benjamin, and experienced in its still fragments. But “progress” kicks in again, and perversely moves the form in reverse, and what was ‘made whole’ becomes yet another form of debris.

So admittedly, a lot of metaphors and images are jumbled up here, but hopefully in a productive, creative tension about space, time, and the ‘nature’ of development, using and stilting the ‘drama’ of the concerto setup. So all this can be imagined, or not, but with attention to the powers of imagination that are suffused by all of the sound.

Angelus Loci

So happy to share this world premiere performance recording of my most recent commission, “A Stone of Hope (Martin’s Song)”. 

As part of a second commission as Hearing in Color's second annual Young Composer-in-Residence, I got the opportunity to write a piece of music for the Music Institute of Chicago (MIC) honoring the great Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as part of MIC's annual MLK Celebration concert in January of this year.

I wrote this for cello, piano, and soprano voice. The text used in this piece are pulled from the various quotes engraved on the MLK memorial in Washington D.C. The title itself comes from the quote “Out of the mountain of despair, a stone of hope." 

It was truly an honor and a pleasure to commemorate the force that is Dr. King and his legacy. His profound words took the music on an emotional journey, and I did my best to capture the core of his message. My favorite quote of his used in this piece is when he said “We must come to see that the end we seek is a society at peace with itself, a society that can live with its conscience." 

Special thanks, as always, to my dear friend LaRob K. Rafael for the support and connecting me with MIC. And many thanks to the incredible MIC faculty musicians I had the pleasure of working with who delivered such a captivating premiere:

Angela De Venuto, Soprano
Mara McClain, Cello
Marta Aznavoorian, Piano

#music #artist #art #musicartist #musician #musiccomposer #composer #worldpremiere #careergoals #composerlife #newmusic #classicalmusic #concertmusic #concert #BlackHistoryMonth #MLK

A Stone of Hope (Martin’s Song) by Ephraim Champion

You can learn to play this piece. FREE scores and parts, among other materials, are available online: kronosquartet.org/fifty-for-the-future

Composed by Aleksandra Vrebalov
© 2016 Kronos Arts Publishing
℗ 2016 Kronos Performing Arts Association
Commissioned for Fifty for the Future: The Kronos Learning Repertoire

Produced by Kronos Quartet
Recorded March 2016 at Studio Trilogy, San Francisco, CA
Engineered and mixed by Laura Dean
Assistant Engineer: Noah Killeen
Production Assistant: Minna Choi
Mixed at Women's Audio Mission, San Francisco, CA
Assistant Mixing Engineers: Victoria Fajardo, Ashley Green, Aimee Hamel, Becca High, Masha Persay, Maryam Qudus

My Desert, My Rose

Aleksandra Vrebalov - My Desert, My Rose

Studz No. 4 is a part of project Nach Bach + 1 , premiered on 27th October 2016 in Belgrade City Hall

Sasa Mirkovic viola

Drasko Adzic compo

DRASKO ADZIC Study No. 4 for solo viola and electronic

Consolation Disappointment, for string quartet performed by Srdjan Sretenovic and the members of Gradilište/Construction at The Festival of Contemporary Music in Belgrade titled Re-Construction.

(Also possible as *la douleur exquise*- the heart-wrenching pain of wanting the affection of someone unattainable)

Consolation Disappointment, for string quartet

Week 6 Mon:Weds 4 Chord Series

Precious audio document courtesy of Jovanka Beba Stepanovic.
Two interviews in one file. 
First one is from Novi Sad in 1993 (00:00 - 27:13), 
second one (27:14 - end) 
is a telephone interview with Mitar Subotic Suba / Rex Ilusivii from Sao Paulo, New Years Eve 1992/93.
https://subaofc.bandcamp.com/

Suba / Rex Ilusivii interviews 1993 and 1992/93

Above the Fray (2020)
for multitrack string quartet

Performed by the JACK Quartet:
Christopher Otto (violin), Austin Wulliman (violin), John Pickfold Richards (viola), and Jay Campbell (cello)

Program note:

From today’s orchestras to the Titanic, classical musicians respond to catastrophe in the most peculiar way – play some Bach tunes. As intensely, beautifully, devotedly, and ignorantly as possible. Because Bach must be our universal healer, our vaccine, our band-aid, our paycheck.

Above the Fray pokes fun at this phenomenon by warping and distorting Bach’s famous “Prelude” from Cello Suite no. 1, unraveling its passages into threads that transform, detune, and degrade at different rates for different performers over the course of the piece. Unlike Western art tradition which believes that classical music is a one-size-fits-all solution, this piece dares to ask what if we all are not the same? What if we each have infinitely unique identities that morph differently under different circumstances? What if our responses to a piece of art wildly differ from each other and change over the course of our lives? And what if art itself is not a static monolith, but rather something dynamic that we allow to breathe, reshape, decompose, and reincarnate into new lifeforms over time?

Many thanks to the JACK Quartet and National Sawdust for commissioning this piece.

Above the Fray

“Natasha Bogojevic has naturally formed her early musical poetic in the realm of postmodernism. Within free and uninhibited observance of the music history masterpieces as well as jazz and especially sounds of rock and pop culture, she took an attitude towards music as to the fascinating archive of sonorities across space and time in which she accepted a challenge to change existing forms through the process of reformulating, quoting, paraphrasing ... creating her own and new world of inter-musical self reflection. She found and then restructured sounds from different times, cultural profiles and backgrounds, like diachronic and synchronic collage and inextricable synthesis of creative curiosity and comprehensible analytical retrospectives.”
Zorica Premate, musicologist

Award winning Serbian/American composer Natasha Bogojevic now lives in Chicago. Her opus includes works for symphony orchestra, solo instruments, chamber ensembles, choral and vocal pieces, electronic and computer music, ballet and numerous scores for theatre and film. Major soloists, ensembles and orchestras in Europe, former Soviet Union, Australia, Canada and USA performed her music. She is the recipient of many awards for composition (UNESCO’s Rostrum of Composers in Paris, The Joseph Jefferson Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Category of Original Music in Chicago, New Music Chicago etc). She received commissions and attended contemporary music festivals such as ISCM WORLD NEW MUSIC DAYS, BITEF, Festival of Experimental Music (led by Pierre Scaeffer, France), Beyond Biography, Gaudeamus, New Music in Middleburg, STIFT Music Festival (The Netherlands); International New Music Festival (Slovakia), Concerts for Peace (Japan); Music Forum (Ukraine); Arrai Music Festival (Canada); Versicherungskammer Bayernin (Germany), AmBul Festival (Bulgaria), International Rostrum of Composers (France), Festival in St. Petersburg and Moscow, (Russia), International Festival of Music & Visual Arts in Tashkent, (Uzbekistan), Electroacoustic Festival in Athens (Greece), Music and Silent Film Festival (Chicago), Annual International Women's Electroacoustic Project, New Music USA etc.
Her biography appeared in several books including “History of Serbian Music and European Musical Heritage”, “Serbian Music: Yugoslav Contexts” by Melita Milin and Jim Samson, Institute of Musicology of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts 2014, “The World of Woman in Classical Music” by Dr. Anne K. Gray, Seven Locks Press.

Consolation Disappointment, for string quartet

Natasha Bogojevic, composer

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