Lazar Đorđević (1992, Serbia) has worked as a teaching assistant at the Faculty of Music in Belgrade at the Department for composition (subfield of music theory) since 2017. He enrolled in the same Faculty at the age of 17, where he studied composition with Zoran Erić. Following his BA and MA studies, he enrolled into the Doctoral academic studies as the youngest student of composition.

He attended master classes abroad, with Peter Ablinger (Austria), Vinko Globokar (France/Slovenia), Stephen McNeff (Great Britain), Sydney Corbett (USA/Germany), Johannes Kretz (Austria) i Yann Robin (France).

Lazar Đorđević’s pieces have been performed in Serbia and abroad at important festivals and events such as the isaFestival, International Rostrum of Composers, Sarajevo Sonic Studio, International Review of Composers, Rossi Fest, OKTOH, КОMА, FESTUM, Еufonija, Dani Vojina Komadine, U čast Predraga Miloševića, etc.

His works have been presented by the most important Serbian ensembles: RTS Symphony Orchestra, Ensemble for new music Construction Site, Camerata Academica, Ensemble Metamorphosis, Belgrade Trio, TAJJ String Quartet, Kragujevac Symphony Orchestra and others. He has collaborated with renowned Serbian soloists including the violist Saša Mirković, cellist Nemanja Stanković and accordionists Vladimir Blagojević and Darko Dimitrijević.

He is a member of the Composers Association of Serbia (since 2015) and Sokoj (since 2017).

His piece D-Madness for viola and 15 strings represented Serbia at the 67th International Rostrum of Composers (IRC) in 2021.

He has received several awards and accolades for his work, including the Đurđevdan Award of the City of Kragujevac in the field of arts, for best piece performed in 2021.

About the piece

The piece D-Madness for viola solo and 15 strings was commissioned by the violist Saša Mirković, who premiered it on the programme of his concert entitled La Folia. The main idea behind the piece is to use a set of interconnected variations to bring back to life, in a brand new context, the well-known, immortal theme La Folia. The greatest challenge was to relocate the theme from the stylistic context of the time in which it originated to the context of contemporary music and compositional-techical aspects of the composer’s own individual style. During the piece, the theme is transformed and adjusted to its new surrounding which presents the theme’s recogniseable components (melody, harmony and rhythm) in a new light. The title D-Madness (The Madness) implies the tonal orientation of the piece in D, but also its dramaturgy. The harmonic pattern of the theme is constant in the form of a persistant bass line, and from its harmonics the vertical chords are produced. The result is a balance between archaic and avant-garde sound.