Milica Đorđević (b. 1984, Belgrade), graduated in composition at the Faculty of Music in Belgrade in the class of Isidora Žebeljan, and sound recording and producing in the class of Đorđe Petrović. She has also attended courses in electronic music with Zoran Erić and Boris Despot. She is currently a student of graduate specialist studies in composition at the Conservatoire National de Région de Strasbourg in the class of Ivan Fedele. She has attended master classes and workshops with many important composers (James Clarke, Peter Eötves, György Kurtag, Louis Andriessen, Martijn Padding, Richard Ayres, Sam Hayden, Wolfgang Rihm, Marc Stropp, Brian Ferneyhough, Misato Mochizuki and Isabel Mundry), in Hungary (International Bartỏk Seminar and Festival), Austria (International Summer Academy Prague-Vienna-Budapest), the Netherlands (12thInternational Young Composers Meeting), Germany (Internationales Musikinstitut Darmstadt), etc.

Her works have been performed at festivals at home (International Review of Composers, KOMA, Days of Mokranjac) and abroad (Great Britain, France, Italy, Austria, Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Macedonia). Her composition The Mirage of Nowhere, Minotaur, or What? was performed by the ensemble ‘de ereprijs’ within the International Gaudeamus Music Week (Amsterdam, 2006). As a finalist of the Staubach-Preis competition within the 44. Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik Darmstadt (2008) she was commissioned a composition for the Arditti Quartet, which had previously already performed one of her compositions.

Milica Đorđević composes applied music. She is one of the originators and chief organizers of the festival of composition students KOMA.

Firefly in a Bottle
Presence is not motion
Nor is it space. Nor time.
It is the direction of motion
opposite to the direction of space and direction of time
. . .
Perhaps it is good luck
that fireflies glimmering in the grass
have never spoken of such things
at the moment of self-contemplation
(Miroslav Antić, The Firefly)

Composition Firefly in a Bottle (2007) was written for Orchestre National de Lorraine as a commission for the festival Acanthes 2007, and performed at the festival’s closing concert under the baton of maestro Sylvia Gualde. The composition exists in two versions, for chamber ensemble and for orchestra for double woodwinds. The questions that served as the starting point for some of my earlier, but also later compositions – what is time and how we perceive it, what is the minimum space we need to survive, what is presence and how limited (or unlimited) it is, what is motion, how and to what extent is it possible… – have been instilled into this composition as well. It is only in a situation in which all possibilities are limited and the number of choices reduced to a minimum that it awakens: that which will not be resigned to a desperate situation of the completeness of meaning ,to finality and unidimensionality, that which relinquishesthe last words, the apology of a soothing order.