Svetlana Savić: La vita fugge

Svetlana Savić (b. 1971, Serbia) is a Full Professor of the Faculty of Music in Belgrade. Since 2011 she has also been a lecturer at the Interdisciplinary studies at University of Art in Belgrade. She won the Stevan Mokranjac prize for 2014 (for her piece Zarobljena [Trapped], for female choir and electronics) and was Musica Clasica’s Composer of the Year 2016. Svetlana Savić has collaborated with renowned Serbian and foreign performers, ensembles, and orchestras. Her compositions were commissioned for Belgrade Music Festival (BEMUS), International Review of Composers, Cello Fest and other festivals in Serbia, USA, Austria, Italy, Germany, France, Israel, Lithuania, Russia, Greece, Japan, and South Africa. Her major works include The Poor Sad Don Juan’s Daughter for soloists, women’s choir, and electronics, Quincunx for string orchestra, Sustineo for symphony orchestra, Beings Without Faces for soloists, mixed choir and string orchestra, Songs about Stars for women’s choir and chamber orchestra, and Soneti [Sonnets] for female vocal, violoncello, piano, and electronics.

“La vita fugge” is the third and final section of Soneti [Sonnets] which was composed between 2008 and 2013. The other two parts of the cycle are: “La Douce Nuit” and “Looking on Darkness.” The main idea of the cycle is to examine the possibilities of transposing a poetic form into a corresponding musical form. The large collection of samples for the sonnets consists of spoken lines written by Michelangelo, Petrarca, Shakespeare and Baudelaire, as well as the recordings of music from the Middle Ages and Renaissance, inspired by love poetry. The lyrics for “La vita fugge” are based on three Petrarca sonnets–the 35th, 61st and 272nd–and Raša Perić’s verbivocovisual sonnet “Holly Incense”. This composition also includes the composer’s own prayer for her mother set to an imaginary orthodox melody surrounded with recorded sounds from Hilandar Monastery. The electronic part is primarily designed for live performance, with sound processors in Logic Pro software, but it can be performed with prepared audio files.