Aleksandra Vrebalov

The 2024 Grawemeyer Music Prize recipient ALEKSANDRA VREBALOV defines her work as an opportunity for healing, service, connection and a celebration of humanness. Her over a hundred works, diverse in aesthetics, genre, and medium, are often inspired by urgent personal concerns and explore themes of identity, place, and belonging.

Living through the wars in former Yugoslavia, Vrebalov has been inspired by the friction between the public and the private side of heroism - like in Beyond Zero: 1914-1918, or her opera The Knock.

ALEKSANDRA VREBALOV’s works – ranging from concert music and opera  to music for modern dance and film – have been performed by the Kronos Quartet, Cincinnati and Glimmerglass Opera, Serbian National Theater, English National Ballet, Rambert Dance, Sybarite5, Gottinger Symphonie, ETHEL, Dusan Tynek Dance  Company, Ijsbreker, Moravian Philharmonic, Belgrade Philharmonic, and Providence Festival Ballet, among others. Her works have been recorded for Nonesuch, Cantaloupe, Innova, Centaur Records, Vienna Modern  Masters, and Ikarus Films. 

Upcoming: Ilektrikes rimes with Kronos Quartet at Philharmonie de Paris, January 2024, This Kiss For The World (four orchestral pieces) at Deutsche Oper Am Rhein, January 20, 2024, Antennae with Cappella Romana at the Cleveland Museum of Arts in April 2024, and as an Italian/Serbian coproduction in Udine and Trieste in July 2024.

Most recent performances include the world premiere of Gold Came From Space written for the 50th anniversary of Kronos Quartet, at the hystoric 6th & I Synnagogue in DC, November 2023; the world premiere of The Knock at Cincinnati Opera in July 2023 (libretto by Deborah Brevoort, co-commissioned by Glimmerglass Festival and Cincinnati Opera). Four Ethereal Pieces commissioned by Kyo-Shin-An Arts have a Serbian premiere with the Academy or Arts faculty and student orchestra with James Schleffer on shakuhachi and Yoko Reikano Kimura on koto in April 2023.

Vrebalov’s six world premieres in 2022 include Ilektrikés Rímes, co-commissioned by Carnegie Hall and David Harrington Sound Research and Development Fund, premiered by Kronos Quartet in Carnegie Hall, This Kiss Kiss For The Whole World for Seattle Youth Symphonic Orchestra and Angelic Incantations for suka and a vocal octet premiered by suka-master Maria Pomiannowska in Gdansk.  For Antennae (2019) Vrebalov got the 2022 Composer of the Year award by music magazine Muzika Klasika. She was awarded the annual gold plaque by Mokranjac Festival (Serbia) for creative achievement and contribution to Serbian culture.

The Knock, a one act opera inspired by lives of military wives, was made into an opera - film in 2021, with Lidiya Yankovskaya conducting and Alison Moritz directing.  Vrebalov’s work Antennae, commissioned by Cleveland Museum of Art got its Serbian performance in Cathedrals of Novi Sad and Belgrade with participation of Academy of Arts from Novi Sad University and Byzantine chanters led by monk Hierotheos (now Bishop Hierotheos of Toplice).  Vrebalov’s work for solo organ Portal RE, was commissioned and performed at the Royal Academy of Music in London in February, celebrating the 200th anniversary of the Academy.  

In 2020 Vrebalov’s 50th birthday was celebrated in an all - Vrebalov concert outdoors, sponsored by the City of Novi Sad and Svilara Cultural Station, opening the Novi Sad Chamber Music Festival.  Vrebalov’s most recent work for James Nyoraku Schlefer and Kyo-Shin-An Arts Praying for Love, celebrating Japanese poetry had its world premiere in NYC in November of 2020.  A full evening string quartet The Sea Ranch Songs (2015) was given its Serbian premiere despite the pandemic, by TAJJ Quartet at 2020 NOMUS Festival with live audience at the Serbian National Theater.

In 2019, Vrebalov had seven world premieres ranging from chamber works, to two orchestral pieces performed by Raleigh Civic Symphonic Orchestra (Peter Askim conducting) and Royal Academy of Music Junior Department Orchestra for English National Ballet (Orlando Jopling conducting), to Abraham in Flames, a chamber opera on the libretto by Niloufar Talebi premiered in San Francisco in May 2019.  Vrebalov was in residence at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, The Cleveland Museum of Art, Creative Fusion: Composers Series (2018-2020), and Flying Carpet Music Festival/Muzikhane, Mardin, Turkey (February 2019)  

In 2018, Vrebalov wrote Missa Supratext for Kronos Quartet and SF Girls Chorus, performed by 200 girls at San Francisco’s Davies Hall, and a soundtrack for Salome by Alla Nazimova commissioned and restored by Kino Lorber and the Library of  Congress, and released on a DVD set Female Pioneers: First Women Filmmakers. 

Vrebalov’s world premieres in 2017 include The Exiles, a piece to accompany the historic choreography by Jose Limon from 1950 in its new staging by Limon Dance Theater and Cosmic Love III  for an ensemble of ancient Chinese instruments performed by the Forbidden City Orchestra in Beijing.  Vrebalov’s work with choreographer Patricia Okenwa, Hydrargyrum, was performed at Sadler’s Wells at the 90th anniversary of Rambert Dance in London, UK.  The Sea Ranch Songs written for Kronos Quartet were released on Cantaloupe in 2016. Her piece for Fifty for the Future: The Kronos Learning Repertoire – My Desert, My Rose was premiered in Carnegie Hall in April 2016.

Vrebalov’s cross-disciplinary interests led to participation at residencies and fellowships that include the MacDowell Colony,  Djerassi, The Hermitage, New York’s New Dramatists, Rockefeller  Bellagio Center, American Opera Projects, Other Minds Festival, and Tanglewood. Between 2007 and 2011, Vrebalov created and led Summer in Sombor  (Serbia), a week long composition workshop with the South Oxford Six composers’  collective that she co-founded in 2002 in NYC. The workshop facilitated  the creation of over fifty new works by young composers from Europe and the USA.  

Vrebalov joined Muzikhane (House of Music) founded by composer Sahba Aminikia in Mardin and Nusaybin, towns on Turkish/Syrian border, making music with young refugees from Syria and Iraq.

Honors and awards: Vrebalov received The Charles Ives Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, The Hoefer Notable Alum Prize from the San Francisco Conservatory, The Harvard Fromm Commission, the Barlow  Endowment Commission, two Mokranjac Awards, two Composer of the Year awards (2011, 2021) by Muzika Klasika, as well as awards from ASCAP, American Music Center, Meet the Composer, MAP Fund, Vienna Modern Masters, and Friends  and Enemies of New Music. As the Douglas Moore Fellow - supported by the Columbia University’s Alice Ditson Fund, she spent a season in the  Glimmerglass Opera, Opera Memphis and Florida Grand Opera, where she was immersed in all aspects of opera production. 

As a Serbian expat Vrebalov is the recipient of the Golden Emblem from the Serbian Ministry of Foreign Affairs for lifelong dedication and contribution to her native country’s culture, as well as 2012 gold plaque Jovan Djorjdevic by the Serbian National Theater for contribution to Serbian opera. 

Edited 12/2023

For more info:  https://soundcloud.com/aleksandravrebalov.