MAHMUD DARWISH

 Per il progetto  Meltin' Choir di CantAbile [ www.cantabile.it] ho tenuto un seminario sulla Musica dei Balcani.

Una presentazione che si è proposta come sguardo critico sulla cosiddetta musica balcanica, sul nostro modo di (non) confrontarci con quell'area, sulla superficialità delle nostre classificazioni. Man mano proverò a rendere conto dei materiali che ho in quell'occasione proposto.

Comincio un po' bruscamente con la scheda riferita a questa significativa musicista serba.

   Ljubica Marić 

Una delle figure più interessanti della musica jugoslava/serba del Novecento. Poeta e artista visuale oltre che compositrice, ha studiato a Belgrado e a Praga, con Alois Hába che allora si cimentava con la micro tonalità.

La sua ricerca, se dovessi trovare un riferimento, la si può avvicinare a quella di un Olivier Messiaen: una musica senza tempo o del mistero del tempo. Nonostante la sua profonda conoscenza della musica della tradizione serba, Marić non ne ha mai fatto una chiave di interpretazione o di espressione. Si è piuttosto palesemente, ma non “filologicamente”, servita del modello bizantino come sfondo ispiratore per esplorare nuove dimensioni della modalità.

Monodia octoicha per violoncello solo ne è l’esempio più significativo. E’ chiaro all’ascolto che dietro ci stanno le Suites di J.S.Bach e l’eredità musicale bizantina evidente fin dal titolo che rimanda agli octoechos .

Questa è l'ottima interpretazione che ne dà Xenia Janković.

Quella che segue è l'interpretazione che Julija Hartig dà di Asimptota, 1° parte, Amsterdam, 2009. 

La sua cantata per coro misto ed orchestra sinfonica I canti dello spazio - Pesme prostora del 1956 trae ispirazione da quella straordinaria tradizione artistica bosniaca costituita dalle steli funerarie dette stečci, su cui sto preparando un libro che non scriverò mai.

Un buona scelta di suoi spartiti musicali acquistabili on line si trova in www.sheetmusicplus.com/search?q=ljubica+maric

Acquistabile su Amazon o su CD Universe l’album:

Un sito dell’Accademia delle scienze Serba [in inglese e serbo] su Ljubica Marić: www.ljubicamaric.com/index.php/en

Quelli che seguono sono due abstracts di articoli pubblicati su Muzikologija, importante rivista musicologica serba, leggibile in http://scindeks.nb.rs/journalDetails.aspx?issn=1450-9814.

Di tutti gli articoli sono disponibili gli abstracts in inglese e gli articoli completi in serbo e, qualche volta, in inglese.

Muzikologija, 2004, iss. 4, pp. 61-82

A composer’s inner biography: A sketch for the study of influences in Ljubica Marić’s oeuvre, Milin Melita,
Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts - SASA, Institute of Musicology

Abstract

Attempting to investigate works of music through frank examination of possible influences is a delicate thing, sometimes maybe dangerous - as has been suggested by Jonathan Cross in his book, The Stravinsky Legacy. While the originality of a composer may appear to be threatened with such types of critique, for musicologists it is important to draw upon a deeper appreciation for how a composer searched for his/her own creative voice. The music of Ljubica Marić (1909-2003), one of the most important Serbian composers of the 20th century, has been chosen to demonstrate how composers need different influences during different phases of their maturation and how they deeply integrate them in order to create an individual utterance. Ljubica Marić first studied composition with Josip Slavenski at the Belgrade Music School (1925-29), and continued her studies with Josef Suk at the Master School of the Prague Conservatory (1929-32) where she obtained her diploma. Finally, she took Alois Hába’s course in quarter-tone music at the same institution from 1936 to 1937. The works she composed during the 1930’s were characterized by a radical will to break ties with traditional, mainly romantic music, so she chose to be influenced by the free atonal pre-dodecaphonic works of Arnold Schoenberg. Following World War II, she introduced some changes of expression that were more in keeping with links from the past. Her music became tonally stabilized, and thematic-motivational developments were rediscovered, resulting in an expression that became milder. But the changes need not necessarily be linked exclusively to the post-war climate of socialist realism. Rather, the previous style may have met up with some type of impasse - the sort that confounds or ultimately transforms an artist. For Ljubica Marić, however, it appears she was never truly satisfied with her first post-war works (1945-1950). What is certain is that she composed nothing during the several years that preceded her first masterpiece, the cantata The Songs of Space (1956). It is however worth examining whether or not they were really "dry years". It is certain that for Ljubica Marić, they were fresh discoveries of Serbian traditional singing, both folk and church, poetic and artistic treasures of the Middle Ages - but she also revived earlier experiences (from the pre-war decade) that she had rejected at the time, mainly the music of Stravinsky, Bartók and Slavenski. Although those influences can be detected in the score of The Songs of Space, the work has a strong individual imprint, an identity of its own. In the works that followed, The Passacaglia for orchestra and in several compositions belonging to the cycle Musica octoicha (Octoicha 1, The Byzantine Concerto, Ostinato super thema octoicha, The Threshold of Dreams) original traits of Ljubica Marić’s poetics became even more pronounced. The last works that she produced (in the 1980’s and 1990’s) are all for instrumental soloists or chamber ensembles. They continue with, and refine the main characteristics of the earlier ones. Ljubica Marić’s evolvement thus presents a search for originality of expression that was reached only after a process of selective assimilation and creative transformation of tradition had been fulfilled - but not until any "anxiety of influences" had been abandoned. It has been shown that Ljubica Marić, like other artists needed to be ready to be influenced, in order to absorb such influences in a creative way.

"Torzo per violino, violoncello e pianoforte", Pablo Schatzman - violino,  Maja Bogdanovic - violoncello, Lidija Bizjak - piano, 11 dicembre 2009, Parigi

Muzikologija, 2009, iss. 9, pp. 65-82

The light of the word in Ljubica Marić's music, Makević Zorica

Srednja muzička škola "dr Vojislav Vučković", Beograd

Abstract

Ljubica Marić's music provides manifold encouragements for consideration in the light of the Logos, according to the teaching exposed in the prologue of the Gospel by St. John. It speaks of the essential inconceivability of time and life, which have their cause in God and His Logos. Seeing through and praising 'the logos of things' guide all its aspects: the tone reveals itself as a vibration, as the energy of lasting and existing, as the beginning of every time and motion; the sonority of different instrumental media is freely expressed and mutually determined in co-action with specific musical and contextual moments; the rhythm evades every regularity and mechanicalness, by which both single duration's and the whole metro-rhythmic course gain a vivid expression. The entire shape of the work is also taken from the reality of psychological and historical time, from its unreductable dynamics, being always in a vivid connection with the space, origin and tradition. The respect for 'the truth of things', the awe before the mystery of time and existence, which call upon the very principle of life in the divine Logos are obvious in everything. Designation of man as a being of light and reason created in the image of God to be the likeness of His being, is expressed in Ljubica Marić's music by the measure of human pulse taken as the basic tempo of her entire opus. Ljubica Marić expressed her consciousness of the reason as a special gift to the man by extremely careful treatment of the words - its meanings, melodies, rhythms, which she always considered the very source of music. The relation between the word and the voice - its sonorous body - is shown in the cantata Songs of Space (1956) as a mystery of the encounter of the Logos and the matter. In relation to her earlier works, this one is a marked breakthrough of the composer's authentic 'voice', which will find its full identity only after receiving the divine Word, symbolized by the melodies of the Serbian Octoechos in the cycle Musica Octoicha (1958-1963). Thus, Ljubica Marić's music has entered its 'New Testament' time and become a specific story of the Logos and His presence in the world and history. In the opaque and dramatic course of that related musical time, the melodics of chanting is experienced as the manifestation of the light, meaning, reason freedom, awe. These graceful effects bring into the work a certain beyond-time dynamics - inverse perspective of time - and, like a Byzantine church dome, they bear witness to the divine condescension. Ljubica Marić's music is steeped in the mystery of the beginning and the end, which meet in eternity, in the One who is Alpha and Omega; in its one tone and in its entire course, it grasps the whole of time and existence - through the divine Word itself by which it has also been made.