The Music of Milica Djordjević

Bavarian Radio’s series Musica Viva always seems to exude a sense of discovery, of freshness, of hope that contemporary music that matters is alive and well: we can look back, for example, to the music of Arnulf Herrmann (this post) and Rebecca Saunders (this post).

Now we come to Milica Djordjević (born 1984: personal website; Wikipedia entry). She studied initially in her hot city before moving to IRCAM via Strasbourg. Finally, she studied in Berlin with Swiss composer Hanspeter Kyburz (born 1960). Dyordjevic won the Ernst Siemens Prize in 2016, and (as as the case with Rebecca Saunders), there was a short portrait film made. his is kind of in German – but there is enough English to make it comprehensible:

The first piece we hear is listed as Mali Svitac …; the three dots presumably imply a shortening of the title, as her website gives this piece as “Mali svitac, između dva treptaja (Litttle firefly, brightly lit and shocked by unbearable beauty; perhaps the full title has echoes of Milan Kundera).

The piece dates from 2023 (it was commissioned by the Berliner Philharmoniker for the 60h anniversary of the Berlin Philharmonieand was premiered by that orchestra under Gustavo Dudamel in October of that year), so the ink would be still wet in the unlikely event the Djordjević uses paper to composer. The present recording marks the piece’s premiere in the Bayerisches Rundrunk/musica viva series by the Bavanrian Radio Symphony Orchestra under Duncan Ward.

Fireflies are important to Djordjević, both in respect of warm memories of her youth, and also in relation to the writings of Miroslav Antič (1932-1986). As the composer puts it in an interview in the BR-Klassik booklet:

Miroslav Antic ́ also wrote a story in verse about fireflies. I find it wonderfully poetic, philosophical and visual – he has a very special imagination. I keep coming back to his work, and discovering new layers, meanings, incredible beauty, and vulnerability.

The concern of the composer is the “immense energy it takes to make things glow”:

Duncan Ward directs a superb performance, visceral, uncompromising – exactly as it should be. Modernist though the music is, it is also characterised by melodic material that is limited to small-interval steps – a characteristic of traditional Serbian singing, as can be heard in this recording of a traditional Northern Serbian folk tune, Oj Devojko Udovaco (worth watching for the slide-show of traditional Serbian dress, too!):

Here’s the World premiere of Djordjević’s Mali svitac … (also on that programme were Boris Blacher’s Fanfare for the Opening of the Philharmonie and Mahler’s Fifth Symphony):

The sound world changes appreciably for Quicksilver, a 2016 piece captured here in its World Premiere as part of the Musica Viva series. Same orchestra, different conductor: Peter Rundel this time. On of Djordjević’s statements seems particularly relevant:

It is in the hidden canons and the micropolyphonic finesse of texture that I find the real beauty and challenge of my work!

There is certainly lots of finesse in Quicksilver. The music is often whispered, and modernist, bu if that implies a Ligeti-clone, think again. This is a highly individual sound: Djordjević posits that the concentration one quit, on concentrated simultaneities and melodies with in small intervallic units, means that there is more going on in the music’s “inside”. And so it is:

There performance is phenomenal. Small examples, like the way the brass section seems hyper-attuned to Djordvević’s timbral awareness, of her use of echo and of shifting foreground/background relationships make the performance a joy to experience. There’s also a raw processional, almost post-Rite in its ferocious barbarism but with an added patina of industrial mechanism that could almost be derived from the Russian Futurists.

Scored for wind, piano and percussion, the 2021 piece Čvor was a dual commission by the Donaueschinger Musiktage and SWR (South West German Radio), receiving its premiere in Donaueschingen in 2021. The present recording is from February 2024 in Munich’s Herkulessaal. The title means “knot” – according to the composer, a knot that suddenly bursts – ar reference to teh composers own pregnancy. Her intent was to convey that

… something is squeezing you and wrapping itself around you – and at some point the release has to come

This is a very.intense piece; when the listener achieves saturation, Djordjevic posits, it is on ly then they can hear the internal counterpoint. Here’s the BRSO performance:

… and here’s the Donaueschingen premiere, the Lucerne Festival Contemporary Orchestra conducted by Baldur Brönnimann:

Finally, the stunning Mit O’ Ptici (Vogelmythos) of 2020 for choir and orchestra with texts again by Antić. The performance here was the World Premiere. As the German translation implies, this is the Legend of the Bird, a parable about an artist and the uncontrollable life his creatures can assume (by extension, I imagine, the composer and her compositions). Here’s the composer:

On the banks of a river, a man, apparently an artist, creates a bird out of sand and water. This is the beginning of the creature’s life, and the dialogue between the two begins. The artist releases the bird into the wild, he lets it fly – because he loves it, and believes in the purity and honesty of the creature to which he has given so much of his own insecurities, longings and pas- sions. But after a year’s absence, a monster suddenly appears in the air. A hideous creature, covered in blood, clearly not ready for the world. Rather than admit his failure, the creator kills the bird with a stone. But the creature cannot be removed from the world, it is reborn, and finally forces the artist to accept it as it is. “I am not your bird, you have assembled me from all your complexes,” it says at one point.

The choir assumes multiple role: narrator, teller of inner monologue, creator of dialogue. Lines between those modes are mixed and blurred util in the final part they cease to exist.

This is a phenomenal performance, the Choir of the Bavarian Radio clearly used to Mondernist music, conductor Johannes Kalitzke completely in control. He needs to be: the third part, “Es verging schon ein Frühling,” is primal, a sort of Stravinskian post-Rite with voices that occasionally cackle startlingly against textures that whirl alarmingly. Djordjević matches some of Birtwistle’s most harrowing textures:

Interested readers might wan also to avail themselves of a Wergo release of Djordjević’s music, in their Deutscher Musikrat, Edition Zeitgenossische Musik series(Wergo 6422 2). The contents of the disc include pieces with the fascinating titles The death of the star-knower – petrified echoes of an epitaph in a kicked crystal of time I&II, and Do you know how to bark? Non-communication for solo contrabass. Another disc of her music appears on the Col Legno label entitled Rocks-Stars-Metal-Light (COL40417)

The disc is available at Amazon here.