Ivan Brkljačić

Ivan Brkljačić (1977, Serbia) holds a BA (2001) and MA (2005) degree in the composition classes of Srđan Hofman and Zoran Erić at the Faculty of Music in Belgrade. In 2012, he successfully defended his doctoral art project, Istar: A Cycle of Nascent Musical Cartoons for Performance in a Theatrical Stage Set, under the supervision of Prof. Srđan Hofman. Works by Brkljačić have been performed many times in Belgrade and other cities in Serbia. Also, his works have been performed in Belgium, the Netherlands, Canada, Sweden, Brazil, the Czech Republic, Italy, Austria, Slovenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Poland, Germany, Croatia, Macedonia, France, Romania, Hungary, England, Australia, and Hong Kong.
Brkljačić has written music for numerous theatre plays, as well as the feature film Ustanička ulica (a. k. n. as “Redemption Street”).
Since 2005, Brkljačić has taught at the Music Theory Department of the Faculty of Music in Belgrade (currently as an associate professor). He also serves as the Faculty’s vice-dean for teaching.
From 2007 to 2015, he served as the programming selector of the International Review of Composers.

Sun King for women’s choir (an Omage to The Beatles). At the beginning of the 2000s, I collaborated with Prof. Darinka Matić Marović in the realisation of my final BA project, which both of us enjoyed. Afterwards, whenever we met, the professor would ask me if I was planning to write something for her Collegium and when. Over time, the question was posed ever more frequently and acquired an additional layer: “You could put something together on the subject of those Beatles of yours”. After a while, I could not avoid it any longer, so I decided to explore what kind of homage to The Beatles one could composed for a women’s choir. The result was a piece consisting of seven songs based on seven relatively well known hits by the band: “In My Life”, “You Never Give Your Money”, “Sun King”, “Ain’t She Sweet”, “Why Don’t We Do It in the Road”, “Got to Get to into My Life”, and “The End”. I used them as a template for creating my own music materials. The work was premièred as many as five times during the Collegium’s tour of Sweden in spring 2007. Nevertheless, I had to be much more patient regarding the Serbian première of the work, right until this year’s Review.