Ernst von Siemens Composer Prize 2023
Sara Glojnarić
Essay
Following Her Star
by Iva Lovrec Štefanović
Astrologists would surely read birthdays as auguries, but the fact that Sara Glojnarić was born (in Croatia, early in the wartime year of 1991) not only on her mother’s birthday, but also on the birthday of the pop icon David Bowie, could be taken as one of the landmarks on her journey ad astra.
Music she was surrounded with as a child has proven to be a natural course for her – she focused her musical training on composition, gaining a solid foundation under professor and academician Davorin Kempf (also a disciple of one of the most significant Croatian composition teachers of the 20th century, Stjepan Šulek, who also taught Milko Kelemen, a composer who left Zagreb for Stuttgart, where he became an important music professor). Sara Glojnarić went to Stuttgart on an Erasmus student exchange and stayed there – until the end of her training and later, in the new class under Martin Schüttler, making this city her habitat, a hub whose roads lead everywhere – both in creative directions and to actual journeys, seminars, residencies or visits.
Opening up to the world which quite naturally penetrated her own gave this young composer a space for playing and experimentation, as well as for profound deliberations on society, injustice or legacy of the century she was born in, taken from someone else’s memories and nostalgia.
With the help of professor Schüttler, she mastered quite different creative expressions, the use of video, multimedia, editing, entirely dispersing any prejudices against non-classical music stock from both history and the contemporary moment. Life in the vortex of new ideas brought Sara Glojnarić to new challenges and her first important awards, like the one in Darmstadt 2018 for a unique idea and realisation of a piece, i.e. an installation under the title popfem, in which she painstakingly and masterfully combines extreme right wing media footage into a unique collaged testimony about the misogynous society and system. An original way of thinking which consequently causes and sets the tone of the editing of the video material, as well as the final work of art and an expression, reveal Sara Glojnarić as a miniaturist, a patient explorer and an explicit activist for women’s rights and for humanity as such, the humanity she strives to perceive as a world of equal, i.e. equitable individuals.
A humorous yet deeply thoughtful piece This Champagne Is Burned (2021) continues along this line across new horizons which unmask the incompatibility of translation (and) synchronisation; this video work, presented in the classic bulwark of the avant-garde, Darmstadt, hierarchises (and juxtaposes) statements and appearances of Karlheinz Stockhausen and Dolly Parton, whose hit song Jolene is like the promenade from Pictures at an Exhibition, and the closing clip from the iconic TV serial Dynasty is accentuated in a concetto manner, like a mannerist verse from the early baroque era.
Sara Glojnarić, as a child born at the close of the 20th century, successfully explores, dissects and reassembles it into her own messages. But not only on the level of analysis and juxtaposition of video materials, but also as a large-scale investigation of pop music and its sound fetishes she then shapes into interesting ‘sugar-coated’ compositions in the Sugarcoating cycle, whose fourth episode (sugarcoating#4) for a large orchestra was successfully performed for the first time at a special concert of the Wien Modern festival (in November 2022), featuring the densest possible derivative of exploration in a study of a million pop songs: the loudness taking over, the pitch and the textures that are more reduced and compressed due to repetitiveness and loops. And it is precisely the density originating from the mentioned that is the most obvious definition of an orchestral piece which presents itself to musicians almost like an athletic discipline, with high demand and virtuosity, as Sara Glojnarić herself once pointed out in an explanation. Glojnarić is, namely, the youngest ever winner of the recently received award Erste Bank Kompositionpreis and the only recipient outside Austria ever to be honoured, however this is only one in a series of awards and honours she has already received – from the Ivo Vuljević Award for young musicians and the Porin Award in her home country Croatia, to important commissions, including new operas, to which Sara Glojnarić always approaches freshly as a team member, but nevertheless her unrelenting instinct for the music’s appeal in such formats unveils itself as a particular trademark of the entire piece. From the opera for children Žabica kraljica to the opera assessed and rated for adults (18+) Im Stein, which was, due to the pandemic, crafted in the unexpected film format based on the namesake novel by Clemens Meyer who also wrote the libretto (an opera which opened up views on existential realities after the fall of the Berlin Wall with details from the world of prostitution and the bleak underground), to the latest challenges she tackled with success. She is currently composing her new opera.
Sara practices sports, on an amateur level, but nevertheless, and triathlon is the discipline she in a way acknowledged in her artistic life as well, with three first performances in three weeks at the end of last year. The connection with this athletic discipline appears also in a new series of compositions she started with Latitudes for a prepared piano. A neat and creatively designed website, collaboration with a publisher, precision in meeting plans and deadlines – one might say, Pure Bliss, to call to memory the title of her recent composition for the Klangforum Wien, a composition which after its first performance in Vienna will tour European festivals and reach the starting point of Sara’s stellar career – Zagreb and its famous Music Biennale, established precisely by (the already mentioned) Milko Kelemen.
The stardust sprinkled across the world by David Bowie and its non-conformist and free creativity quite certainly landed on Sara Glojnarić, unburdened by categories and classifications often accompanying music, who directs her gaze to the skies and sometimes reciprocates with a surprising view of our present time, of the essential notions and views in life, ever imaginatively and ever so very humanly.