Branka Popović (1977, Belgrade) graduated from musicology and composition departments (studying with Zoran Erić) of the Belgrade Faculty of Music. She obtained her Master of Music in Composition at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London studying with Judith Bingham. She stayed for another year at Guildhall as the Composition Fellow. Currently she finishes her doctoral studies in composition at the Faculty of Music in Belgrade (with Zoran Erić). Her pieces were performed at International Review of Composers, Belgrade; KoMA festival; Birthwistle Festival (London), Brass Spectacular (Glasgow), and City of London festival. In 2002 she won a prize for trio Dram (I.S.o.F) at the Summer Music Academy BudapestPrague-Vienna. She won a prize for best movie music for Tačka prekida (dir. by Igor Toholj) at the 56th Festival of Documentary and Short Film (Belgrade, 2009).

Song cycle for baritone and piano Red Easy a Color was composed to the lyrics by American poet Jerome Rothenberg published in 1971 in the collection Poems for the Game of Silence, 1960-1970. Rothenberg’s poetry, already in early stages, was created in respect to James Joyce and Walt Whitman, which could be seen in experimenting with syntax, form and content. He was especially interested in verbal and non-verbal poetry of the North-American Indians: poetry that, in his own words, could be expressed through music, non-verbal phonetic sounds, dance, gesture and event, game, dream, etc… Read Easy a Color is a text composed by extremely reduced verbal means, with dominant sound and visual components through which from time to time the sentences or group of words that indicate theme, emerge. These fragments are instructions for the reader to whom the possibility and freedom to finish the story in his/her own way has been left. These features made Red Easy a Color convenient for interference with other media, and music suggestively uncovers it in its own, specific way…