Milorad Marinković (1976, Serbia) studied composition and conducting at the Faculty of Music in Belgrade with professors Rajko Maksimović, Vlastimir Trajković, Stanko Šepić and Biljana Radovanović. He received his MPhil (magister) degree and then his doctorate from the composition department. He is currently working as an associate professor at the Faculty of Philology and Arts in Kragujevac, at the Department of Music, where he teaches analysis of musical styles, arranging, harmony with harmonic analysis.
He has won several domestic and foreign awards for composition. From 2011 to 2020, he was a member of the Board of Directors of the Association of Composers of Serbia; twice he was a member of the jury of the “Stevan Mokranjac” award and once nominated for that award. As a conductor he leads amateur church choirs.
In his oeuvre he nurtures new Orthodox spiritual music for choirs a capella, symphonic, concert music, chamber and children’s music. His works have been performed in the country and abroad, and have been published on several occasions.
He is married to Mirjana. They have four children.
About the work
Passacaglia for viola and piano exists in two versions – for cello and piano, and for viola and piano. This work was created as a result of the Marinković’s return to his student oeuvre and its re-composition, with the goal of examining the possibilities of an artistic upgrade through a dialogue with the composer’s former self. Pasakalja as a form was re-actualized in the 20th and 21st centuries, and many composers resorted to it. The theme in this passacaglia is much longer than the usual passacaglia themes, so the number of variations is smaller. The work starts from the aesthetics of modernist composers and tries to take the next step in the same direction, that is, to prolong their interest in this form. Elements of the composer’s aesthetics combine the wide breath of chanting with the expression that is typical of passacaglias throughout all styles, locating this work stylistically within the derivatives of modernism, which have survived in the postmodern era, believing in their renewed stylistic reactualization. This music, without much pretence, aims to renew the search for a consistent expression; it rejects playing with materials and reassignment typical for postmodernism, in an attempt to find its own autonomous musical meaning. From variation to variation, the harmonic language, texture and the relationship between viola and piano change, through which the dramatic arc of the work is built with several different characters, among which reflective, contemplative and narrative elements dominate with short-lived islands of dramatic and scherzo-like episodes, by means of which the musical climax of the work is achieved. The dialogue between piano and viola is fragmented and one can get the impression that the instruments are somewhat independent, i.e. separate in their own presentation of musical thoughts. In this way, contemplation, which ultimately evokes silence itself, remains dominant in the work.