Rossi fest Belgrade

Kristopher Magnuson is a composer from Cleveland, OH. Recent works have seen (or are scheduled to see) performances at the AMOK Experimental Music Platform in York, UK; the Sound Thought Festival in Glasgow, Scotland; the Canadian Music Centre in Toronto, Canada; and the SoundSCAPE Festival in Maccagno, Italy. He has also completed works for guitarist Rob MacDonald in affiliation with the Canadian Music Centre, the Genkin Philharmonic at SUNY Buffalo, and multiple electronic works for the Cleveland Ingenuity Festival. His Palos for string quartet, based on flamenco song forms, won first prize in the University of Toronto String Quartet Composition Competition, and received its world premiere with the Cecilia Quartet at the 2015 University of Toronto New Music Festival. He received his DMA in composition from the University of Toronto in 2018, where he studied with Gary Kulesha. His dissertation, Gambier Mass, was scored for winds, percussion, electric guitar & delay pedal, and men’s chorus. Future works will largely focus on melding the art/alt-rock aesthetic with traditional notions of lieder.

The Circle (2018)

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The Circle is a work for horn trio and soprano that melds the art-rock aesthetic with more traditional notions of art-song or lieder. Its title is drawn from an eponymous poem by Polish writer Zofia Romanowicz. On both technical and emotional levels, I strove for accessibility and immediacy to allow the listener to focus on the poem’s text.

Martin Loridan is a French composer. He graduated from the Paris Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique (CNSM) and is currently pursuing a PhD in composition at the University of Leeds (UK). His work has been performed internationally at venues and festivals such as the Barbican Center (London), BKA Unerhörte Musik (Berlin), Gasteig Philharmonie (Munich), Estovest Festival (Turin), Mise-En Festival (New York), Kalv Festival (Gothenburg), International Forum of New Music Manuel Enriquez (Mexico City). He has collaborated with ensembles and orchestras such as the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, the Arditti Quartet, ensemble Mise-en, Soundinitiative, Klangforum Wien, Ensemble Xenia, ensemble Accroche Note, Quatuor Tana, Norrbotten NEO, Cepromusic, and international soloists such as Claude Delangle, Rohan de Saram and Claudio Pasceri. He has been awarded prizes in several composition competitions, such as the Reinl-Foundation Composition Prize, the André Jolivet Composition Prize, and the Vareler Composition Prize. He also receives academic grants and awards such as the Stanley Burton Research Scholarship and was recently awarded the prestigious Villa Salammbô residence (Tunis) by the Institut Français. His PhD research develops the idea of “Souffle” (air, breath, and movement) as a multidirectional composition material and composition tool, working on timbre, and texture and exploring relationships with resonance and vibration. His research is funded by the “Leeds Doctoral Scholarship”. His works are published in BabelScores editions.

Chimères, nous sommes montés…

(Chimeras, we have ascended...)

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The piece is a homage to René Char. René Char was a 20th-century French poet and member of the French Resistance. The piece sets to music a specific excerpt from “Seuls demeurent”, a poetry collection was written during the war (1938 – 44) but published in 1945. Char was strongly opposed to any form of publication during the French occupation, and, as suggested by the title (“Seuls demeurent”), poetry and its aim are for him the objects that “only remain” in the war’s horror. The piece is inspired by the very last verse of “le visage nuptial” (the largest poem of “Seuls demeurent”) which is an evocation of a brief moment of joy - the love Char briefly found with Greta Knutson during the summer of 1938, before engaging in the somber horror of the war as a resistant. The phonetic and symbolic richness of the text generates the main musical flow. The work starts from the very respiration to slowly create an instrument/voice dialogue, exploring every detail of Char’s words, to ultimately reach an almost silent flow of air (end) - the evocation of the two lovers’ respiration but also of one of death and horrors still to come.

Mark’s music is motivated by extra-musical processes of invention. His practice focuses on the parallels between architectural space and musical time. His spatio-temporal renderings are steadily reaching wider audiences with recent performances across Europe, North and South America, and Australia. Mark is a graduate scholar of the Royal College of Music, Master of Music in Advanced Composition Programme, earned his Bachelor of Music with Honours in Performance from the Victorian College of the Arts – University of Melbourne and his Bachelor of Music in Composition from the Elder Conservatorium – University of Adelaide. His concert music has received recognition through commissions by Hans Westerman AM, Núcleo Música Nova, British Harpsichord Society, National Portrait Gallery UK, and the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra; premiered at venues including Teatro da Reitoria Brazil, Handel House London, St Martin-in-the-Fields, the National Portrait Gallery UK and the Melbourne Recital Centre. In 2017, Mark was announced the winner of both the Flute New Music Consortium Composition Competition for his solo flute piece Hamarøy Troll and the Etymos Ensemble Composition Prize for Umbra-Penumbra-Antumbra for vibraphone. Mark is currently undertaking his PhD candidature at Queensland Conservatorium, Griffith University.

Without an Exit

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‘Without an Exit’ is a musical rendering of Daniel Libeskind’s spatial design in the architecture of his Felix-Nussbaum-Haus. Dedicated to the life work of the Jewish painter Felix Nussbaum, a fleeing fugitive forced to work in secret within tiny hidden spaces and killed in Auschwitz in 1944, ‘Without an Exit’ is a retracing of the fatal elements and dead-ends of Nussbaum’s life. The confusing and labyrinth-like orientation of the Felix-Nussbaum-Haus is architecturally designed to influence the visitor’s experience. The directional conditions in ‘space’ translate into the composition’s arrangement of musical events in ‘time’, while Libeskind’s conceptual ideas for integrating physically and spiritually an expression of Nussbaums’s martyred life provides the musical narrative.

​Musicologist and art theorist, Research Associate at the Musicology Institute of SANU

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She earned her doctorate from the Faculty of Music in Belgrade, focusing on the relationship between voice, vocal technique, and new technologies in contemporary art and popular music. Her research spans contemporary music and art, voice studies, metal music, art, and media, as well as research methodologies in art, music, and musicology. She has published three monographs and has been part of editorial teams for numerous collections of works and other scientific publications. In recent years, she has dedicated particular attention to the work of Dragutin Gostuški, contributing to academic conferences, reissues of his writings, and the first collection of works devoted to this significant figure of Serbian and Yugoslav cultural history. She is a co-founder of the Association for the Preservation, Research, and Promotion of Music "Serbian Composers," a co-founder and vice-president of the Association for Popular Music Studies, and a co-founder, as well as the editor-in-chief, of the scientific journal INSAM Journal of Contemporary Music, Art and Technology (Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina).