Vlastimir Trajković


Vlastimir Trajković was a Serbian composer, and full-time professor of composition and orchestration at the Faculty of Music, University of Arts, Belgrade, Serbia.

Biography

Trajković was born in Belgrade in 1947. The descendant of a family that has yielded three generations of musicians, Trajković studied composition at the Faculty of Music under Vasilije Mokranjac. Upon graduating in 1971 and earning his master's degree in 1977, Trajković attended Andre Laporte and Witold Lutoslawski's international summer course in Grožnjan, Croatia. From 1977–78, he completed his specialisation with Olivier Messiaen at the Paris Conservatoire.
He secured his first teaching post in Stanković Music School in 1971, where he remained until 1975. Since then he has been teaching at the Faculty of Music in Belgrade and acquired a full-time Professor of Composition and Orchestration position in 1993. He was also Head of Department of Composition and Orchestration from 1988–2007. Among other notable Serbian composers, Katarina Miljković, Isidora Žebeljan, Ognjen Bogdanović, Anja Đorđević, Božo Banović and Aleksandar Sedlar Bogoev have all either graduated or earned their master's degree under Trajković's supervision; his student was also Đuro Živković. In 2001 he was a member of the jury for the International Jeunesses Musicales Competition for violin and was elected a corresponding member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, becoming a full-time member in 2009.
Trajković's oeuvre has been performed in Serbia, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Germany, Hungary, Austria, Ireland, the United Kingdom, Japan and the United States. In the domain of musicology, and in collaboration with Slobodan Varsaković, he undertook to fully restore the bequest of his grandfather, Miloje Milojević, by classifying his numerous manuscripts, compositions and papers into a comprehensive catalogue. He died in Belgrade at the age of 69 on 4 January 2017.

Style

Trajković has been at the forefront of Serbian post-modernism. Ever since his earliest works, his rich erudition has been a logical journey towards a postmodern synthesis imbued with an exploration of the range of avant-garde, and the spirit of 20th-century French music. Arion, Le Nuove Musiche Per Chitarra Ed Archi is regarded as the key achievement of this style's early phase in Serbian music; here the composer applies the postmodern repetitiveness to a chord progression originating in extended jazz modality, building a clear musical form in which quasi-improvisational guitar solos alternate with an extremely slow succession of chords introduced by the strings. It is the simplicity, contemporaneity and effectiveness of the piece that deeply impacted the Serbian music of the early 1980s. Throughout the following decades, Trajković was to continue and develop his creative play with styles and musical dialects, as well as his own interpretation of the history of music itself through works such as the Poulancesque Sonata for Violin and Piano and Concerto for Oboe and Orchestra. Epimetheus for organ, is a recognisable nod to Messiaen, whereas Ten Preludes for Guitar, composed in a contemporary jazz-neoclassical style, stand among the most popular pages of contemporary Serbian guitar music. Duo for Piano and Orchestra and Sonata for Violin and Viola pay homage to musical expressionism, while the Sonata for Violoncello and Piano evokes his late romanticism. However, these simple commentaries are only a nod in the direction of the journey of travel of Trajković's curious musical spirit; he would more or less regularly combine, within a single piece, the basic eclectic ideas with popular music genres, and, particularly, post-impressionism.
The Concerto for Piano and Orchestra represents a huge synthesis of Trajković's oeuvre. It is a rich, personal vision of 20th-century music, supported, as it were, with two hidden music quotations - from De Falla's Nights in the Gardens of Spain and from Rachmaninov's Piano Concerto no. 4. Here, Trajković's fascination with certain styles or oeuvres of other authors is expressed by musical means, whereas other styles are renounced by being paraphrased in incongruous technique. Trajković's most recent body of work demonstrates a certain settling and "academisation" of the style accompanied by an exceptionally adroit profiling of expert technical treatments. Zephirus Returns recycles and, by means of post-modern stylisation, "disintegrates" the Franco-Italian flavour by hybridising Monteverdiesque patterns and post-impressionist expression. Cinq poèmes de Mallarmé are composed after the author's own translation of Mallarmé's poetry, following the rhythm and the accentuation of the French language in the strictest possible sense, in pursuit of the subtlest permutations of the verses and post-impressionist musical colouring. As a result, the identical vocal part can be performed in either the original French verse, or the corresponding Serbian translation.

The composer's own notes on selected works

Duo for Piano and Orchestra

As I was getting down to work on the piece, I remember feeling...therefore, I remember feeling that I could express "the marvellous" through music alone, by my own colours, my own tonal order....the "marvellous" being essentially warm and emotive, but in a modern way, a warm-and-emotive lyrical feeling experienced by every genuine scientist or physicist in the face of the inexorable "accuracy"....and the primaeval power of the forces of Nature. And it is in that tale - the tale which tells itself alone, devoid of human presence - it is in that objectivism that the deflection from the old, romanticistic, anthropomorphic sentimentality lies.

Concerto for Oboe and Orchestra

If Duo is the anti-concerto - then the Oboe Concerto in F Major is the "real" concerto. The objectivism of it, the serenity undisturbed by any subjectivist engagement, the image of one "perfect world" unshaken by the human and the too-human, is perhaps classical, with all the recognisable topography of the four-movement sonata cycle. However, a certain James Bondian activism of the even movements.....as well as the Ravelian and the Gershwinian soul of the odd ones, point this concerto-divertimento in a specific and distinctly modern direction.

Cinq poèmes de Mallarmé

Five poems by Mallarmé make up the poetic template for the work, and have been personally translated into Serbian by the composer. Many solutions and inventions of Kolja Mićević, the most famous translator of Mallarmé's poetry...have proved useful, and have therefore been accepted occasionally by the composer, in his ambition to not only achieve a translation that is both accurate and plausible from the semantic, poetic and metric view points, but also to accomplish an adaptation which would follow the melodic line derived from the original, French verse, with virtually no changes to the structure of the vocal phrase.

Awards and prizes