Djuro Zivkovic, a 38-year-old composer who was born in Serbia and lives in Stockholm, has won the 2014 Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition for his work “On the Guarding of the Heart”.
The prize, awarded annually by the University of Louisville, is among the most prestigious international prizes for classical composition and carries a cash award of $100,000.
The winning work is a 20-minute chamber orchestra score that uses extended techniques — unusual string and wind timbres that evoke almost electronic-sounding textures —as well as keyboard and percussion effects, to create an eerie soundscape that moves between moments of sparseness and stasis and densely turbulent passages.
Mr. Zivkovic was born in Belgrade in 1975, and has lived in Stockholm since 2000. Besides composing, he is a violinist and violist, and is on the faculty of the Royal College of Music in Stockholm. “On the Guarding of the Heart” was given its premiere in Belgrade in 2011 by the Austrian new-music group Das Klangforum Wien.
Previous winners of the Grawemeyer Award, which was named for the industrialist H. Charles Grawemeyer and was established in 1984, include Witold Lutoslawski, John Corigliano, John Adams, Louis Andriessen, Pierre Boulez and last year’s winner, Michel van der Aa.
Autor: Allan Kozinn, Source: nytimes.com
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