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


SA

 

People Directory

Milica Bakić-Hayden

Lecturer
PhD, University of Chicago, 1997

2612 Cathedral of Learning
412.624.5989, e-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Fields
Religion and society in the Balkans and South Asia, topics in comparative religion

Teaching
Eastern Orthodoxy, Mysticism East and East, Saints East and West, Religions of India I, Religions of India II: Storytelling as a Religious Form, Christian-Muslim Relations

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Publishing

Theological Disambiguations

An Unconventional Handbook of Orthodox Theology

by Rev. Vladan Perisic

Foreword
by Fr John Behr

It is a great pleasure to see this work published, making available some of the most important writings of Fr Vladan Perisic over the last couple of decades available, together in one volume, to an English speaking audience. Fr Vladan’s work is well known in Serbia, and in broader academic and ecumenical circles. But it can now receive the much wider readership that it deserves, and, as a collected volume, its scope, coherence, and significance is sure to receive the recognition it deserves.

The eighteen essays collected here treat diverse topics, from academic theology (and its place in the Church) to questions of life and death, from historically oriented studies, on Sts Ignatius and Gregory Palamas, to contemporary issues, such as human rights and ecology. Each of them is characterized by meticulous scholarship and great insight, clarity of thought and expression.

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