Aleksandra Vrebalov

Aleksandra Vrebalov, recipient of the 2024 Grawemeyer Music Award, is a composer whose work brings different musical worlds into close, living contact. Her more than one hundred works, spanning concert music, opera, dance, and film, explore themes of identity and human connection.

Her work moves fluidly across cultural and sonic landscapes, drawing on influences from regions where she has lived and worked, including the Balkans, the United States, China, and the Middle East. This synthesis is experiential, grounded in long-term creative processes and sustained artistic collaborations. Among these, her decades-long work with the Kronos Quartet stands as a defining relationship, resulting in twenty works that have expanded the expressive possibilities of the string quartet.

Vrebalov’s music has been commissioned and performed by institutions including Carnegie Hall, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the Gulbenkian Foundation and Philharmonie de Paris, the English National Ballet, Glimmerglass Opera, Cleveland Opera, and The Forbidden City Orchestra in Beijing. Her work has been described as “refreshingly unneurotic” (The New York Times), “a strange and sober beauty” (The Times, UK), and “chilling and beautifully structured” (The Guardian).

Working fluidly across a wide range of instrumental contexts, Vrebalov writes for both Western and non-Western instruments. Her scores, in both standard and open notation, often integrate archival recordings and the sounds of ethnic instruments into contemporary forms. This work extends into a continuous engagement with young musicians and communities, from repeated collaborations with girls’ choirs in San Francisco and Brooklyn to Community MusicWorks in Providence and the Flying Carpet Festival, serving the refugee youth on the Turkish–Syrian border.

There are more than twenty recordings of Vrebalov’s music released internationally, including on Nonesuch, Cantaloupe, Albany Records, and New Amsterdam. Her scores are distributed by Composers Edition in London.

Vrebalov biography short (150 words)

Aleksandra Vrebalov is a composer known for bringing different musical worlds into close, living contact. A recipient of the 2024 Grawemeyer Music Award, her versatile work spans more than one hundred pieces across concert music, opera, dance, and film, and is marked by long-term creative collaborations, most notably with the Kronos Quartet, for whom she has created twenty works.

Her music has been commissioned and performed by Carnegie Hall, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the Gulbenkian Foundation and Philharmonie de Paris, Cleveland Opera, the English National Ballet, and The Forbidden City Orchestra in Beijing, as well as by dance companies including José Limón and Rambert.

A New York–based composer born in Serbia, Vrebalov is a member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts and a recipient of awards recognizing her contribution to national culture. She has sustained engagement with young musicians and communities, from girls’ choirs in San Francisco and Brooklyn to Community MusicWorks in Providence and the Flying Carpet Festival, where she made music with refugee youth on the Turkish–Syrian border. Her work, distributed by Composers Edition in London, appears on more than twenty CD releases worldwide.

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