Ivan Brkljačić (1977, Serbia) graduated in composition from the Belgrade Faculty of Music (2001, Prof. Srđan Hofman), and acquired his M. Mus. degree at the same school with Prof. Zoran Erić (2005). Currently, he’s finishing his doctoral program in composition at the same institution in the class of Prof. Hofman. His pieces were performed in Serbia, Romania, Hungary, France, Macedonia, Germany, Poland, Slovenia, Austria, Italy, Czech Republic, Sweden, Brazil and Australia (in April 2010 his piece Jinx was performed at the opening of World Music Days in Sidney).

Ivan Brkljačić composes for theatre; some of the theater houses he worked for are: Raša Plaović Stage, Atelje 212, Duško Radović, Zvezdara Theater, Belgrade Drama Theater.

He works as assistant lectprofessor at the Department of Music Theory of the Belgrade Faculty of Music.

He was awarded Mokranjac Award (2005) for When the Curtain Rises Seven Times for symphonic orchestra.

The music under the title Mokranjac was written at the same time for two ensembles – 1) string quartet and 2) soprano and string quartet. Neither one of the two represents the rearrangement of the other – they are both equal. The piece was wrtten as a commission of the Music School “Mokranjac” from Belgrade in which the composer has taught and to which he’s connected with beautiful memories.

The form is conceived as a set of variations (theme with seven variations) on the fragment “Na kameni ispovjedanija” from the “Njest svjat” movement of Stevan Mokranjac’s Opelo. Beside the basic instrumentation for string quartet, the composer has enriched the piece with a female voice singing the fragments from Mokranjac’s Rukoveti, and in finale the very melody “Na kameni ispovjedanija” represents the authentic document through which Mokranjac most directly becomes present in the composer’s piece. Short song excerpts were taken from Rukoveti nos. I, III, V, VI, VIII, IX, X and XI.