Olga Janković was born in Russia, in Siberian town Bodaybo. She finished elementary music and art school in Irkutsk, grammar school in Moscow, and secondary music school „Vasa Pavić“ in Podgorica, Montenegro. She completed Bachelor and Master studies of composition in the class of Svetlana Savić at the Faculty of Music in Belgrade, where she is currently working as a junior researcher and completing her Doctoral academic studies in composition.

Olga Janković is very active on the art scene as an author and producer of numerous interdisciplinary project. She is very involved in incidental music (for film and video games), and she has recently focused on music-stage art. Following the success of her first opera (City of Belgrade Award 2022 for her chamber opera Čista voda), the composer  is currently working on the opera trilogy Permafrost and on full CGI video opera It will Rain, which bring together experts and creatives from the gaming industry and the world of music, enriching contemporary music practices with the use of new technologies (Unreal Engine & MetaHuman Creator).

About the piece

How to make a bonfire II

Among many examples in world mythology and art which mention fire or flame and their symbolics, the composer chose a slightly different source of inspiration – Russian rock music of the 1990s.

In 1992 rock band “Mashina Vremeni”, or more precisely its founder Andrey Makarevich, wrote the song “Kostёr” (“Bonfire”), where he compares this fire to a human lifetime and says that “each fire will be extinguished sooner or later, but while it burns – everybody maintains it in his own way”. Somebody will allow it to burn slowly, while somebody else will burn all the fuel at once and “his flame” will burst into the sky. This very metaphor, the comparison of the fire with some sort of life energy, gave impetus to the composer to write this piece, first as a work for symphony orchestra, and subsequently in arrangement for string quartet.

In the words of the composer, „How to make a bonfire is an abstract direction of sorts, and at the same time – the source of the same driving life energy for the listener.”