Aleksandra Vrebalov

The 2024 Grawemeyer Music Prize recipient ALEKSANDRA VREBALOV defines her work as an opportunity for healing, service, connection and a celebration of humanness. Her over a hundred works, diverse in aesthetics, genre, and medium, are often inspired by urgent personal concerns and explore themes of identity, place, and belonging.

Living through the wars in former Yugoslavia, Vrebalov has been inspired by the friction between the public and the private side of heroism - like in Beyond Zero: 1914-1918, or her opera The Knock.

Her work is characterized by a fusion of influences from various musical traditions of the countries where she has lived or traveled, including the Balkans, the United States, and the Middle East. Her works have been commissioned by Carnegie Hall/Kronos Quartet, Boston Symphony Orchestra (2024/25), English National Ballet, the Cincinnati and Glimmerglass Opera, Serbian National Theater, Belgrade Philharmonic, The Forbidden City Orchestra in Beijing, and Jose Limon and Rambert Dance Companies, and described as “refreshingly unneurotic” (NY Times), “ a strange and sober beauty” (The Times, UK), “chilling and beautifully structured” (The Guardian). She has extensively collaborated with the Kronos Quartet, for whom she has written 20 works.

Vrebalov has written music for Western instruments, as well as ethnic and historical instruments from the Balkans, Asia, and Poland. A fellow of the MacDowell Colony, Rockefeller Bellagio Center, Djerassi, American Opera Projects, American Lyric Theater, The Hermitage, and Tanglewood, Vrebalov has received The Harvard Fromm Commission, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Charles Ives Fellowship, the Barlow Endowment Commission, and a MAP Fund grant.

In her native Serbia, she has been honored with the Golden Badge of the Cultural and Educational Association of Serbia/Ministry of Foreign Affairs for her long-term contribution to Serbian culture (2015). She is a two-time winner of the Mokranjac Award: in 2009 for “Stations” and in 2011 for the opera “Mileva.” She has also won the “Muzika Klasika” award for Composer of the Year twice, for her opera “Mileva” (2011) and “Antennae” (2021), the latter commissioned by the Cleveland Museum of Art. She is a corresponding member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts. There are more than twenty CD releases featuring Vrebalov’s work, recorded for labels such as Nonesuch, Cantaloupe, Innova, Orange Mountain Music, New Amsterdam, Centaur Records, and Vienna Modern Masters. Her self-published works are distributed by Composers Edition in London, UK.

For more info:  https://soundcloud.com/aleksandravrebalov.