Ivana  Stefanović

Ivana Stefanović (1948, Serbia)
Stefanović specialised at IRCAM in Paris.
She worked on musical broadcasts at Radio Belgrade and its Drama Section, where she edited the broadcast Radionica zvuka (Sound Workshop).
She lectured at the Centre for Women’s Studies in Belgrade. She was the director of the cultural programme at the Centre for Democracy Foundation, artistic director of the BEMUS festival, and State Secretary at the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Serbia.
Currently, she runs the Centre for Action in Music.
Works by Stefanović have been performed throughout the region and Europe, the Middle East, Australia, Canada… and at festivals such as Gaudeamus, BEMUS, Zagreb Biennale, Helsinki Biennale, Prix Italia, Music Harvest Odense, New Music Week Bucharest, ISCM…
She has also been active in boundary areas of music, including radiophony and stage music.
Stefanović has published three books: Put za Damask (Road to Damascus, prose), Muzika ma od čega (Music of No Matter What, essays), and Privatna priča (A Private Story, her family’s history).
Stefanović has won a number of Serbian and foreign prizes and awards, including the Stevan Mokranjac Award for composition, Miloš Crnjanski Award for literature, Sterija Award for theatre music, Prix Jean Antoine – Triomphe variétés (Monaco), SLABBESZ (Austria), Vitomir Bogić Award for radiophony, and the International Review of Composers award, among others.

Silence/Tišina. I was entirely unaware of the English Romanticist poet Thomas Hood (1799–1845), until I stumbled upon “Silence”, a rather gregarious poem of his. It fit right into my own process of artistic exploration of all the parameters and meanings of the notion of silence, which I had been pursuing for some time.
This poem illuminates two faces of silence: it explores true silence as an entity of emptiness and opposes it to silence filled with “quiet” contents: traces of humans, other beings, history, memories, echoes, wind, clouds, silent shadows… On that journey, the poet arrives at a poetic personalisation of Silence and finds it – as though it were a proper noun – “self-conscious and alone”.