Stanko Simić (19087, 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.

Posmatranje neba (Viewing the Skies) is a single-movement symphonic work in the genre of symphonic poem. Concerning musical time, the author pays special attention to the relations between the work’s aleatoric and non-aleatoric sections and structures, but not only that; the most spiritual moments in the piece (which at the same time constitute its culmination points) involve a reminiscence of Sergei Rachmaninoff’s sacred song “Bogoroditse devo”. The main part in the flow of musical time is played by the alternation of various leitmotivs, such as the melodic fourth and fifth motive of rising, the fa-mi-re motive of inevitability, the motive of presence in the piano part, etc. To a degree, these leitmotivs do indeed relate to the title of the work, but the title itself represents only a reflection on the part of the author himself who, whilst composing the piece, contemplated the hidden depths of nature and man’s vital connection to it, in order to hear it through the mediation of thought and achieve a voice of his own – by viewing the skies.