Stanko Simic

Stanko Simić (1987, Serbia) completed undergraduate studies (the class of Vlastimir Trajković) and master studies of composition (the class of Zoran Erić) at the Faculty of Music in Belgrade in 2015. He then became a doctoral student of composition at the same institution, under the supervision of Zoran Erić. At the same time, he earned a master’s degree in piano (the class of Lidija Stanković, 2011) and his student performance was awarded as the best performance in all main subjects that year (Slobodanka Milošević Savić Foundation Prize, 2010); three years later, he won the Josip Slavenski Foundation Award of the Composition Department, for his work Talasi (Waves, 2013). During the past several years, Simić has participated in seminars taught by renowned composers, such as Luca Francesconi, Larry Alan Smith, Rokus de Groot, Nils Henrik Asheim, Clemens Gadenstatter, and Yann Robin. He was a finalist at the 2012 Krzysztof Penderecki International Composers’ Competition (Arboretum, Poland), as well as the 2014 Città di Udine Composition Competition (Italy). He is a full member of the Composers’ Association of Serbia and SOKOJ and currently works as a teaching assistant at the Music Theory Department of the Faculty of Music in Belgrade.

In figurative terms, Memoria, written in the summer of 2017, represents a string of memories, a suite of impressions, or, perhaps more pertinently, a book of memories. It alludes, evokes, and carries in itself images of tireless winds, the strong shoulders of Atlas, as well as images of the gloomy colours of inevitability, fragility, and absence. In musical terms, this piece represents an attempt to create a sound game, in which the author toys with fragments of the well-known medieval chant Dies irae. Perhaps this music, as a sort of background in poetic terms, might best be described with the following lines:
Like a bookmark
between book pages
shaped
by my boyhood
memories
I don’t want to lose
the tracks
leading me
all the way to the back
a title to my unrecognisable
presence.
(Don Maurizio Rolla, Memory)