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

Zivkovic Wins Grawemeyer Music Prize

“On the Guarding of the Heart,” a piece for chamber orchestra by Serbian-born composer Djuro Zivkovic (joo-ROH’ zhiv-KOH’-veetz), has won the 2014 University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition.

The 20-minute work “makes a huge emotional journey in a relatively short period of time, moving through many landscapes between the mysterious, moody opening and the ecstatic conclusion,” said award director Marc Satterwhite.

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“The composer also makes wonderful use of the colors of the 14-piece ensemble. The instruments are used in fascinating ways, both traditional and otherwise … that shape the sound of unnatural, echoing beauty,” he said.

Zivkovic, 38, describes the piece as an “instrumental cantata” inspired by the religious music of Bach. Its main theme is the need to return to oneself.

“It is about hard-achieved detachment, stillness and watchfulness, it’s about solitude and exile,” the composer said.

Born in Belgrade in 1975, Zivkovic has lived in Stockholm, Sweden, since 2000. He is active as a violinist and violist—with a special interest in improvisation—and teaches at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm.

Austrian ensemble Klangforum Wien gave the first performance of “On the Guarding of the Heart” in November 2011 in Belgrade. The piece also has been performed in Vienna and Bergen.

Zivkovic’s music has been commissioned, performed, recorded and broadcast across Europe and North America by ensembles such as Sonanza, Klangforum Wien, Trio Fibonacci, Musica Vitae Chamber Orchestra, BIT20 and Stockholm Symphonic Wind Orchestra and people such as conductors Emilio Pomarico and Baldur Brönnimann and Swedish contralto Anna Larsson.

He received a Swedish Grammy Award 2010 (Grammis) with Sonanza for his piece “Le Cimetière Marin” for mezzo-soprano and ensemble.

Influenced at an early age by folklore and Byzantine music, he has developed a wide range of composing techniques such as polyrhythms, improvisation, harmony-based scales and microtones. Over the past decade, he has become particularly interested in harmonic organization, an area he has identified as crucial in modern compositions.

UofL presents four Grawemeyer Awards each year for outstanding works in music composition, world order, psychology and education. The university and Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary jointly give a fifth award in religion. This year’s awards are $100,000 each.

For more details on the awards or to download Zivkovic’s photo, see grawemeyer.org

From University of Louisville


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People Directory

Bishop Stefan (Lastavica)

The first Archpastor of the Eastern American and Canadian, come Eastern American Diocese of the Serbian Orthodox Church was Bishop Stefan (Lastavica) (1963–1966). The consecration of the newly elected Bishop Stefan took place on the Synaxis of the Holy Apostles, July 13, 1963, at the hands of Bishops Hrizostom of Branicevo and Visarion of Banat, in the Church of the Holy Prophet Elijah in Aliquippa, Pennsylvania.

Bishop Stefan was born September 14, 1908, in the village of Divos, Srem, into a priest’s family. He graduated from the Seminary in Sremski Karlovci and the Faculty of Orthodox Theology at Belgrade University in 1939. Prior to the election of Bishop, he served in the highest Church hierarchical and legislative institutions. Thus, he gained vast experience in Church legislature and administration.

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Publishing

My Brother's Keeper

by Fr. Radovan Bigovic

Rare are the books of Orthodox Christian authors that deal with the subject of politics in a comprehensive way. It is taken for granted that politics has to do with the secularized (legal) protection of human rights (a reproduction of the philosophy of the Enlightenment), within the political system of so-called "representative democracy", which is limited mostly to social utility or to the conventional rules of human relations. Most Christians look at politics and democracy as unrelated with their experience of the Church herself, which abides both in history and in the Kingdom, the eschaton. Today, the commercialization of politics—its submission to the laws of publicity and the brainwashing of the masses—has literally abolished the "representative" parliamentary system. So, why bother with politics when every citizen of so-called developed societies has a direct everyday experience of the rapid decline and alienation of the fundamental aspects of modernity?

In the Orthodox milieu, Christos Yannaras has highlighted the conception of the social and political event that is borne by the Orthodox ecclesiastical tradition, which entails a personalistic (assumes an infinite value of the human person as opposed to Western utilitarian individualism) and relational approach. Fr Radovan Bigovic follows this approach. In this book, the reader will find a faithful engagement with the liturgical and patristic traditions, with contemporary thinkers, Orthodox and non-Orthodox, all in conversation with political science and philosophy. As an excellent Orthodox theologian and a proponent of dialogue, rooted in the catholic (holistic) being of the Orthodox Church and of his Serbian people, Fr Radovan offers a methodology that encompasses the above-mentioned concerns and quests.