A great man is one who collects knowledge the way a bee collects honey and uses it to help people overcome the difficulties they endure - hunger, ignorance and disease!
- Nikola Tesla

Remember, remember always, that all of us, and you and I especially, are descended from immigrants and revolutionists.
- Franklin Roosevelt

While their territory has been devastated and their homes despoiled, the spirit of the Serbian people has not been broken.
- Woodrow Wilson

Aleksandra Vrebalov

Aleksandra Vrebalov (born September 22, 1970 in Novi Sad, Yugoslavia) is a Serbian composer based in New York City. She studied composition with Miroslav Statkic at Novi Sad University, then with Zoran Erić at Belgrade University, Elinor Armer at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, and Ivana Loudova at the Prague Academy of Music. She obtained her Doctor of Musical Arts degree from the University of Michigan where she studied with Evan Chambers and Michael Daugherty.

.

A highly regarded musician, she has had residences at the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center, Tanglewood, New York's New Dramatists, MacDowell Colony, and American Opera Projects among others. She has received Awards or Fellowships from the American Academy of Arts and Letters Charles Ives Fellowship, Meet the Composer, Highsmith Composition Competition, Vienna Modern Masters, Serbian Fond for an Open Society, ASCAP Awards, and Douglas Moore Fellowship.

Her early string quartet Pannonia Boundless, evoking eastern European sonorities, has been recorded by the Kronos Quartet on their album Kronos Caravan (1999) and published by Boosey and Hawkes (2007). The Kronos Quartet, with clarinetist David Krakauer, premiered her 40-minute "Babylon, Our Own," commissioned for the 10th anniversary season of the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center at the University of Maryland in College Park, Maryland, in September 2011.

In her more developed orchestral work Orbits (2002), Vrebalov uses overlapping densities of sonorities and rhythmic proportions such as the Fibonacci series to portray her idiosyncratic post-modern conception of musica universalis.

Her music for the ballet The Widow's Broom (2004) based on Chris Van Allsburg's book has been performed on Halloween by the Festival Ballet Providence.

She has received commissions from Kronos Quartet, Carnegie Hall (co-commission), Barlow Endowment, Festival Ballet Providence, Merkin Concert Hall Zoom Series. Vrebalov is also a co-founder of South Oxford Six, a composers' collective in New York.

In October 2011 her 2-act opera "Mileva," on a libretto by Vida Ognjenović based on her play, was premiered at the Serbian National Theater in Novi Sad, with a repeat performance at the Sava Center in Belgrade as part of the Belgrade Music Festival (BEMUS). The opera was commissioned to mark the 150th anniversary of the Serbian National Theater. The scenario centers on the character of Mileva Marić, the Serbian physicist and mathematician who was Albert Einstein's first wife.

Wikipedia

ПОЛИТИКА ONLINE: Опера о Милеви Ајнштајн


SA

 

People Directory

Lance Sijan

Lance Peter Sijan (April 13th, 1942 - January 22nd, 1968) was a United States Air Force officer and fighter pilot. He was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for his selflessness and courage.

Sijan was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1942 from a Serbian father and Irish mother. He graduated from the United States Air Force Academy in 1965, and after attending pilot training, was assigned to the 366th Wing at Da Nang Air Base, Vietnam.

.
Read more ...

Publishing

Serbian Americans: History—Culture—Press

by Krinka Vidaković-Petrov, translated from Serbian by Milina Jovanović

Learned, lucid, and deeply perceptive, SERBIAN AMERICANS is an immensely rewarding and readable book, which will give historians invaluable new insights, and general readers exciting new ways to approach the history​ of Serbian printed media. Serbian immigration to the U.S. started dates from the first few decades of 19th c. The first papers were published in San Francisco starting in 1893. During the years of the most intense politicization of the Serbian American community, the Serbian printed media developed quickly with a growing number of daily, weekly, monthly and yearly publications. Newspapers were published in Serbian print shops, while the development of printing presses was a precondition for the growth of publishing in general. Among them were various kinds of books: classical Serbian literature, folksong collections, political pamphlets, works of the earliest Serbian American writers in America (poetry, prose and plays), first translations from English to Serbian, books about Serb immigrants, dictionaries, textbooks, primers, etc.

Read more ...