Nemanja Radivojević (1981, Serbia/Switzerland), guitarist and composer. After obtaining a BA degree in guitar from the Academy of Arts in Novi Sad, Radivojević continued his education in Geneva with an MA degree in music theory, and then in Bern, where in September 2015 he acquired an MA degree in composition under the supervision of Xavier Dayer. His works have been performed by Ensemble Recherche (Freiburg, Germany), Contrechamps (Geneva), Marka (Geneva), Ensemble Proton Bern, Hodiernis (Bern), Ensemble Interface (Frankfurt), and AdHOC (Cluj, Romania), among others. He composed incidental music for ten theatre plays at Brod teatar in Novi Sad and also works as a music critic for Dissonance, a Swiss contemporary music journal. In October 2015, under the auspices of TOTEMs, a project of the New Artistic Spaces Academy and the French National Centre for Stage Creativity, he began work on a new opera with a group of composers and writers.

Pharos for an octet – a common denominator in my music is meta-reflection on the process of composition itself: in creative playing around, constant observation and reinterpretation of compositional tools and procedures serve to establish methods for craftsmanship development, which enable a permanent (re)construction of style and musical language, at the same time leaving ample room for free improvisation of the spirit, in a seductive play of musical elements. The sonic-harmonic world of my music, constructed on the legacy of avant-garde and spectral music, close to the aesthetics of Feldman, Nono, as well as The Doors and punk rock, is part of an almost baroque structure, which rediscovers the pleasure of creation in an utterly free sensuous fashion, where the ideal of purity is rejected, in a liberation from the fear of the material, in an unbridled abandonment to play.