Aleksandra Vrebalov

LIGHT CODES (2019) for ancient Chinese instruments. 10 minutes. Written for the Forbidden City Orchestra. If played together with Cosmic Love III, it should be played as part one.

COSMIC LOVE III (2017) for ancient Chinese instruments and countertenor. 8 minutes. It is inspired by the rich sensory experience (sounds, views, tastes, smells) from a month long journey throughout China in the spring of 2016.  The richness of the culture, sounds and shapes of ancient instruments, ritualistic dresses and movement of fantastic musicians whose performances I heard, silence in temples, kids laughing in the monsoon rain, a search for solitude in cities of multimillions, monks' deep eyes, colors of the peonies, arches of graves in the mountains that we drove by...all these impressions are part of COSMIC LOVE III.  I also looked back to my own Serbian culture and old Byzantine singing and merged it with beautiful sounds of Chinese ancient instruments so that something magical and new can be born from these two great musical traditions.  The language of the singing is imaginary, the words do not have a meaning in any existing language.  I hope you hear them as a praise to beauty, truth, and love.  I am grateful for the honor to write music for the Forbidden City Orchestra.

70 minutes live improvisation, with Dusan Tynek Dance Theater. Choreography by Dusan Tynek. Prepared piano four hands, wooden flutes, vocalizing – Aleksandra Vrebalov and Luciano Chessa. Baruch PAC, New York City. For more on this collaboration see here: https://aleksandravrebalov.music.blog/2019/03/03/the-laughing-garden/

Raleigh Civic Symphony Orchestra with Peter Askim conducting the world premiere of OUR VOICES (2019), Raleigh, NC. This 25 minute piece commemorates the centennial of women’s suffrage in the United States. More on this work here: https://aleksandravrebalov.music.blog/2019/04/02/our-voices/

Piano Solo, 10 minutes, Pianist Dale Tsang premiering INDIGO CODES (2019) at the San Francisco Conservatory, as part of Ensemble For These Times Film Noir concert, San Francisco, CA. More on this concert: https://sfcm.edu/performance-calendar/event/film-noir-project.

“The moments when the suave vocal murmurations of Vrebalov’s score come together into a rich, moody harmony feel like the outcomes of some hard-won psychic battle….luminous and transparent score….this is music full of dramatic nuance and inventive delight — not merely the backdrop to the protagonist’s life passage but its very essence.” Joshua Kosman for San Francisco Chronicle

70 minute chamber opera in two acts. Music Aleksandra Vrebalov, Libretto Niloufar Talebi, Direction Roy Rallo.

My interest in Abraham in Flames opera was to explore creativity as a way to interact with the world and the self, through a prism of being young and female. Having the Young Women’s Chorus of San Francisco on board meant that in addition to their fantastic skill and talent, I could tap into the incredible power of sincerity, depth, and beauty that comes with that stage of life. The voices of girls symbolically act as complex layers of emotions, of each of us, when we search for the meaning and allow ourselves to show those emotions to others. The openness and fearlessness with which they deliver this musical material, charged with feeling, I find liberating.

I wanted to create an opera that’s very much like the world (in its most positive, ideal aspect) that we live in – a rich, stimulating mosaic of values, identities, cultures, religions, mythologies that pushes us towards self-discovery and self-realization. 

Premiere May 9, 2019, Z Space, San Francisco, CA. More on this work here: http://www.zspace.org/aif

Vrebalov and Talebi about the process see HERE.

Read the review in San Francisco Chronicle HERE.

New soundtrack for Alla Nazimova’s silent film Salome (1923) restored by Kino Lorber and the Library of Congress. 71 minutes. Released here: https://www.kinolorber.com/product/pioneers-first-women-filmmakers-blu-ray

Accordion Concerto, 22 minutes, written for Goran Stevanovic and Gottinger Simphonie Orchester, premiered at the Deutches Theater Gottingen in May 2017. Based on sevdalinka songs from Bosnia.

Missa Supratext is a mass beyond language and anthropocentrism, and is unrelated to any religion.  The text is made up, with no meaning; it is rather a vehicle for voice, that is a vehicle of soul, to express emotion beyond verbal narratives.  The idea for the piece -- to celebrate the interconnectedness of all life, and beyond it, of all life and all matter -- came up in my conversations with David Harrington several years ago.  At that time Kronos was recording A Song for The Sea Pig, so I had seen the amazing actual creature for the first time.  How come it hasn’t made it into a Mass yet?  That coincided roughly with the time of the Quartet’s travels to Quito, Ecuador, inspiring more thoughts about our planet with its strange life forms, predictable and beautiful laws that govern our existence, the reliability of rhythms of natural phenomena and of life amidst its chaotic profusion.  That awe inspiring creative force, the un-nameable consciousness driving all life does not care for culture, language, and religion. This kind of a Mass certainly has its patriarchs and matriarchs: besides sea pigs, roses, all of Kronos, the equator line, every bell ever made anywhere – and Allen Ginsberg.  The language as we know it is used only in one place in Missa Supratext, in Holy All, referencing Ginsberg’s Footnote to Howl.  

Mileva is an opera about Mileva Maric Einstein, the first wife of Albert Einstein. 
The work is commissioned for the 150th Anniversary of Srpsko Narodno Pozoriste (Serbian National Theater) in Novi Sad, Serbia, Maric’s and Vrebalov’s hometown.  The opera is in two-acts (10 scenes), for full orchestra, chorus, 10 soloists, and tape - with documentary audio material such as Albert Einstein’s voice and tamburica band. 
The complex character of Mileva Maric is portrayed by two singers – a lyric soprano for young, idealistic Mileva, and a dramatic soprano for Mileva in later years of her marriage with Einstein, as a way to juxtapose different and often conflicting psychological tendencies of the main character. 
The libretto is written by a Serbian playwright, Vida Ognjenovic, and is based on Ognjenovic’s play Mileva Einstein.  The libretto includes fragments from Shakespeare, and Urworte, a poem by Goethe.  The poem is like a thread of memento mori throughout the opera, always sung by Mileva. The languages in the opera are Serbian, English (the excerpt from Shakespeare and the explanation of the E=mc2 formula in Einstein’s original voice) and German (excerpts from Goethe’s Urworte, and Einstein’s letters).

PERFORMANCES
*February 6, 2014 - Serbian National Theater in Novi Sad
*November 22, 2013 - 21c Liederabend Op. 3, BAM/Next Wave, NYC excerpt from Act II, Lullaby
*December 12, 2012 -  Croatian National Theater in Zagreb
*October 12, 2012 - Armel Opera Festival in Szeged, Hungary
*January 24, 2012 - Serbian National Theater in Novi Sad
*January 23, 2012 - Serbian National Theater in Novi Sad 
*November 3, 2011 - Serbian National Theater in Novi Sad
*October 25, 2011 - BEMUS Festival Belgrade
*October 21, 2011 - Serbian National Theater in Novi Sad
AWARDS
November 3, 2012, Composers’ Association of Serbia 2012 Mokranjac Prize for the best work premiered in Serbia in the previous year
October 15, 2012, Victoria Markaryan wins the Armel Opera Competition with her performance as Mileva Junior

March 28, 2012, Novi Sad, Serbian National Theater Annual Awards:
*Gold Medal Jovan Djordjevic for contribution to opera to Aleksandra Vrebalov
*Conducting award to Aleksandar Kojic for musical direction of Mileva
*Awards for best roles to:
Violeta Sreckovic, mezzosoprano for Mileva Senior
Darija Olajos, soprano for Mileva Junior
Jelena Koncar, mezzosoprano for Zorka

March 10, 2012, Muzika Klasika Magazine Composer of the Year 2011 
Aleksandra Vrebalov for Mileva

For string quartet and clarinet, 40 minutes. Babylon, Our Own is written for Kronos Quartet and David Krakauer, and inspired by their passionate and masterful playing of diverse styles of music.  I wrote the piece having in mind their individual characteristics as performers (Krakauer’s ecstatic high register, David Harrington’s uncanny responsiveness in dialogue-like sections, John Sherba’s rare ability to carve a shortest phrase into a beautiful musical statement, Hank Dutt’s most soulful solos, and Jeff Ziegler’s powerful triple-stops and superhuman rhythmic precision).  That resulted in a piece in which times, places and cultures intersect to celebrate music as the language I feel most comfortable with, a language that brought all of us together.  I imagine the single-movement form of Babylon, Our Own unfolding like a ritual, carrying one through a vast range of memories and visions triggered by pre-recorded documentary audio materials.  Filtered and manipulated to different levels of abstraction, pre-recorded sounds include snippets of friends’ voices speaking their names, New York City street noise, Kronos Quartet and David Krakauer rehearsing the piece, gatherings of groups in religious fervor, the prayers of the Pope, the Dalai Lama, and the Orthodox Patriarch, Morse code, as well as my grandmother reciting the poetry she had learned as a child in the 1930s.  The acoustic material - the interplay between clarinet and the individual instruments of the quartet - is a celebration of human relationships and interconnectedness of us all.  Each individual part is like a thread in an intricate web, responding to or triggering immediate and distant events throughout the piece. In non-musical terms and very much inspired by my long relationship with Kronos, in Babylon, Our Own I wanted to create something I’ve always hoped to experience in reality: a moment of high sonic complexity in which all of us – from ‘everyman’ to powerful spiritual leaders – simultaneously join voices in declaring that we all are equal, that to each other we are holy.  Invoking names at the end of the piece is a way to acknowledge the presence of each of us in this moment, so that Thy Name becomes a name of a friend, a sibling, a parent, a child, in its simple beauty it becomes - your name.    Babylon, Our Own was commissioned for the 10th anniversary season of the Clarice Smith Center at the University of Maryland in College Park.  I especially appreciate the opportunity to continue my relationship with this visionary institution for contemporary music.

Aleksandra Vrebalov

August 12, 2011, NYC

For string quartet, gusle, and tapan (bass drum), 20 minutes.

The Balkans, with its multitude of cultural and religious identities, has had a troubled history of ethnic intolerance. For my generation of Tito’s pioneers and children of communists, growing up in the former Yugoslavia meant learning about and carrying in our minds the battles and numberless ethnic and religious conflicts dating back half a millennium, and honoring ancestors who died in them. By then, that distant history had merged with the nearer past, so those we remember from World War II are our grandparents. Their stories we heard firsthand. After several devastating ethnic wars in the 1990s, we entered a new century, this time each of us knowing in person someone who perished. In November 2007, as I was writing the piece, a new generation of Albanians and Serbs had their war songs on YouTube, bracing for another conflict, claiming their separate entitlements to the land and history, rather than a different kind of future, together.

Strangely, the cultural and religious differences that led to enmity in everyday life produced— after centuries of turbulently living together—most incredible fusions in music. It is almost as if what we weren’t able to achieve through words and deeds—to fuse, and mix, and become something better and richer together—was instead so famously accomplished in our music.

… hold me, neighbor, in this storm … is inspired by folk and religious music from the region, whose insistent rhythms and harmonies create a sense of inevitability, a ritual trance with an obsessive, dark energy. Peaceful passages of the work grew out of the delicately curved, elusive, often microtonal melodies of prayers, as well as escapist tavern songs from the region, as my grandmother remembers them.

For me, … hold me, neighbor … is a way to bring together the sounds of the church bells of Serbian orthodox monasteries and the Islamic calls for prayer. It is a way to connect histories and places by unifying one of the most civilized sounds of Western classical music—that of the string quartet—with ethnic Balkan instruments, the gusle (a bowed one-string instrument) and tapan (large double-sided drum). It is a way to piece together our identities— fractured by centuries of intolerance—and to reach out and celebrate the land so rich in its diversity, the land that would be ashen, empty, sallow, if any one of us, all so different, weren’t there.

An ongoing cycle of pieces exploring relationships and intimacy, with different instrumentations, all based on minimal melodic, rhythmic and harmonic patterns.  

Spell no. 1 - piano and vibraphone, commissioned by Diane and Nick Petrella in 2008.   
Two instrumental lines are two characters transformed through their relationship.  Through mutual interaction they provoke, challenge, and disturb each other, they change roles, occasionally overcome crisis, they rejoice in a loud, buoyant togetherness, like magnets they fuse, then explode to nothingness, they exhaust and depend on each other.  Tired and changed, they end up in a tender, yet cranky embrace, aware of each other’s fragility and delicate powers that bind them together.

Spell no. 2 - two pianos

Spell no. 3 - violin and electronics

Spell no. 4 - string quartet, shells, tibetan bowl, tape

Spell no. 5 - flute, clarinet, violin, cello, piano, tape

Spell no. 6 - soprano, flute, violin, cello, piano

Spell no. 7 - viola solo

Spell no. 8 - soprano, shakuhachi, violin, cello, piano. There is no score to the piece, only the parts -- the merging of individual parts depends on each performer's listening and choices. Therefore follow your ears, follow the instructions in your own part. Also, engage deeply, yet freely with the material as well as with your fellow musicians' choices. The analogy of the piece is similar to that of life where we get to play our part without having a definite roadmap/score that would define circumstances, other people's behaviors, as well as a preconceived, expected, ideal outcome.
In life we are instead accepting of a reality in which we rely on resources and
information available at a given moment and we act and survive based on momentary choices rooted inour experience, knowledge, and sensibilities.
My hope is that the performance will provide a sense of wonder and exploration as well as a feeling of being supported and stimulated by the openness of the material itself.
I also hope that each performer would develop and/or nurture a sense of community and create a shared experience in which one's individuality supports and feeds the collective.

Chronological list of works between 2010 - 2016

Check out the SCORES link above.

For sound:

Check the youtube Phi Press Channel

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2FzdgQ4R0JY