Edition: IV
Bio/Studies
Ana Gnjatović (1984, Belgrade) is a composer of acoustic and electro-acoustic music, collecting and combining found items, works, concepts, and ideas that lend themselves to generalization, translation, interpretation, and sonorization. She graduated in 2008 from the Department of Composition and Orchestration at the Faculty of Music, Univeristy of Arts in Belgrade, in the class of Prof. Milan Mihajlović. She is currently attending Ph.D. studies at the same department in the class of Prof. Srdjan Hofman.
Career
Ana Gnjatović has attended various composition masterclasses and workshops in composition and improvisation, working with composers Chaya Czernowin, Julia Wolfe, Louis Andriessen, Luca Francesconi, Georg Friedrich Haas, Ivan Fedele, Trevor Wishart, and Mark André, among others.
She was commissioned by the Milan‐based new music ensemble Sentieri Selvaggi, for their 2009 season Musica Leggiera, was a prize winner of the Summer Academy Prague‐Vienna-Budapest (2005) for her piece canvas, and a winner of the FoM Belgrade ‘Josip Slavenski’ award for the piece moj plišani oklop.
Her pieces have been performed in Serbia, Germany, Austria, Hungary, The Netherlands, Macedonia, Italy, the USA, Denmark, and Japan, and have been programmed at festivals such as the International Review of Composers, Mokranjčevi Dani, KoMA, the International Festival Harpsichord – Living Art, Espressivo (ME), and the International Harp Festival ‘Harp Connection’.
Notes on the Musma Composition
“Balance Lost”
Ana: “I believe that how we learn about life, about experiencing it and interpreting it, is somewhat similar to how a child learns language. From breath to voice, from voice to word, from word to phrase, the ability to express, to interpret, to explain, is constantly growing, but the experiences behind, the essence of what is being said remains unchanged. Near the end of Balance – lost I paraphrase the first line of the four-part setting of the French chanson Mille regretz: “Mille regretz de vous abandonner“ [“A thousand regrets at deserting you“]. With the exception of different sonifications of breath, all of the text used in the piece is derived from the first two words of the song (mi-i-le-e-re-gre-ts-s, with permutations) and the sonorous potential of this material. That way, I tried to cause the same “understanding backwards“ process in a listener that I had had while writing, and that we all have whenever thinking about our lives; I tried to make every re being remembered as part of regretz.”
