Mirela Ivicevic: Scarlet Songs

Unrestricted, energetic, explosive ? Mirela Ivicevic is one of the most enthralling composers of her generation. Her works are performed at international festivals and interpreted by well-respected ensembles such as Klangforum Wien and Ensemble Nikel.

Many of her works revolve around self-empowerment she herself has experienced. They tell of relationships, of sexuality and pregnancy, but also of powerlessness, of war and destruction. They demand independence and freedom, a space free of ideologies and power dynamics. This occurs not only on a conceptual but also on an acoustic level. Dominant orders, hegemonic relationships, are suspect to Ivicevic, no matter in which context. Tense and anarchic, Ivicevic's compositions resemble rebellious acts.

Mirela Ivicevic studied composition and music theory at the Zagreb Music Academy with Zeljko Brkanovic, media composition and applied music with Klaus-Peter Sattler in Vienna and composition with Beat Furrer in Graz. From 2010 to 2017 she worked as co-curator and producer of the festival Dani Nove Glazbe Split.

She is one of the co-founders of The Black Page Orchestra, a Viennese ensemble for radical and uncompromising music of our time. She collaborated with many ensembles and artists of different fields in- and outside Europe in a wide range of genre-bending projects, her list of works including acoustic, electroacoustic and intermedia compositions for various line-ups; live solo sets up to pieces for large orchestra, sound installations, music for film and theatre as well as three operas. She received, among others, the State Scholarship of the Austrian Federal Chancellery, Josip ?tolcer Slavenski Prize for her Musiktheater PLANET 8, Erste Bank Composition Prize and Composers' Prize of Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation. In 2019 Mirela Ivicevic was a fellow of the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program. She currently lives and works in Vienna.

"Ivicevic's style often reminds me of a techno DJ mixing one record after another, layering heterogeneous sources into a continuous stream [?] Romitelli's ghost stands at her shoulder but Ivicevic' is bringing multimedia edginess somewhere new." ? Gramophone