Ivana Ognjanović

Ivana Ognjanović (b. 1971, Serbia), a composer and performer, completed her studies in composition at the Faculty of Music in Belgrade. She obtained her Master of Arts degree in multimedia composition at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater in Hamburg. She is an author of pieces for orchestra, chamber ensembles, electronics. She was a member of an interactive, multimedia, international ensemble European Bridges Ensemble (EBE), specialized for music composition and performance over the internet, with which she performed for ten years (2005–2015). She participated in events such as the Salisbury festival (UK), Connecting Media (Hamburg), Elektronische Nacht (Stuttgart), Making New Waves (Budapest), Music In the Global Village Conference (Budapest), Klangwerktage (Hamburg), ICMC2008 (Belfast), ENTER 2009 (Prague), SiggraphASIA2009 (Yokohama), KoMA and International Review of Composers (Belgrade), ISCM WNMD 2013, Greatest Hits Festival Hamburg 2014. She won the International Rostrum of Composers Award in 2021 (the general category) for her piece Lonesome Skyscraper for symphony orchestra and electronics. She lives in Belgrade.

About the piece

The piece Izobličenje stvarnosti Fernanda Vidala  [Fernando Vidal’s distortion of reality] for piano and electronics is based on a motive from the novel On Heroes and Tombs by Ernesto Sabato, and it was commissioned by Neda Hofman-Sretenović. A dream, pleasant or unpleasant, obsessive, the one from which we wake up abruptly, or the one in which we would like to stay forever, is a message from the subconsciousness that can liberate us, but also imprison us. Then, we live the ‘distortion of reality.’