Who am I? Text written by Rudjer Glavurtic. 

15 MINUTES OLDER 
Tempo allegro con fuoco 242 wpm 
Forte 
Rudjer Glavurtic 

If you have the light, you should not keep it where nobody will see it. It should be set on a high ground so it can burn for the others too. I have occupied myself lately with trying to bring order among my compositions, to make them available to those who want to perform them and listen to them. It’s not as easy as it looks, given the circumstances that I’ll explain here. I found almost all the scores that I intend to present. I have the help and encouragement of Solbjörg Björnsdótter, a singer and a student of art management who I met recently. This gives me the energy to do what I’m doing at the moment, and that’s writing about myself. Specifically, while talking about presenting and distributing my work, Sol has proposed, among other things, to put comments next to the scores along with some information about myself. As far as the comments to the compositions are concerned, I think that music doesn’t need explanation in words, that it should speak for itself, although in spite of this I wrote quite a bit about some of my compositions. These texts grew from comments into something completely different. They became essays per se, independent literary forms inspired by musical ones. In short, it seems to me that I don’t know how to write comments to my own compositions. As far as the information about the “composer” is concerned, I’ve planned to put in some of my CV’s that I’ve already had ready. But, while reading them, I had a very strong and equally unpleasant impression that they don’t say anything about me, they don’t say anything about my music, don’t say anything much about anything at all, even if they are full of facts. So I decided to write a new introductory text about myself and my relationship with my work. I would like to write about the compositions in general, without describing them. I’d like to write something about the process of creation, and about what these works mean to me, and in the end, about the reason behind my work. In this short, introductory text, which will stand in front of my compositions I am faced with a terrifying question: Who am I? I’m afraid I don’t have an answer to that elementary question. It is what I’m trying to find out. It is a question I will leave open in this text. Any answer I could give wouldn’t be complete and wouldn’t be final. It seems like the truth and reality defy any definition I could find. In this text, since I’m writing it as an introduction to my compositions, I should introduce myself as a composer. So, I-composer will be the dominant element. I have to say something here: I have to be completely immersed in any creative activity I’m doing, I have to be completely in what, that what I’m doing, to be able to do it at all. In that sense, in this very moment, as I am writing about myself as a composer, I am not a composer, I’m a writer. In this moment I am creating a literary form. I am a writer who is writing about a composer. Actually, not only about a composer but also about a writer, a painter, an architect, a philosopher. All these roles and activities reflect in the process of my composing, and through writing about composing I’ll write about them as well. However, I think I can best express my divergent affinities through composing; it is how I can fully express myself. Composing can contain everything else, and everything else for me can be, and is, a part of the process of composing. I cannot separate processes of creating and living. While thinking and writing about any aspect of my creative work, I’ll write about myself: about my deeper self, about my past. That’s one important reason for my composing and writing, for doing any other form of creative work. This helps me to discover myself. Creating is my confrontation and my battle with myself. The process of writing is leading me towards the answer to that terrible question: Who am I? I’m on my way. I’m moving. Yes, I’m in constant movement, even when it looks like I’m not. So far I’ve gone through countless exciting moments: I’ve escaped death by the skin of my teeth several times, I often fell and along the way I’ve learned how to fall, and how to deal with the pain of the blows I have taken. Often, I was tired. Tired of traveling, I wouldn’t know which way to proceed, but then I would find fantastic landscapes, and enjoy them while traveling by, or while they would go through me. Everything on this path is temporary, our sufferings, as well as our joy. Nevertheless, there is a need to keep the things that are passing by, to own something that is eternal, to not let the time erase some things that we deem important. People I have met, the events along the way, the ideas that surrounded me, made an impact on me, consciously and subconsciously. Of course, I made an impact on them, too, it is always an interaction. They formed me and I formed through them and became what I am now. To keep all those moments that have gone by, I record them. I form something that will last out of them, something that I’d like to share with others. With someone like me. Creative work opens the possibilities to share some valuable experiences with someone who might be far away in space and time. Maybe with someone who hasn’t been even born yet. The final part of the composition Can You Hear It Now for an ensemble of percussions I wrote in desperate desire to continue my communication with one wonderful woman, once very close to me, who tragically left this world. Through creation, it’s possible to transform tears into pearls. I consider Can You Hear It Now, dedicated to Charlotte van Eijkeren, to be one such pearl among my compositions. At certain times, creative work is an instrument of healing like none other. During the process of creation, a miracle happens. Something new is born, something that until that moment didn’t exist. The creator carries the God’s seed inside. When I think about it, the act of creation is a miracle that leaves me breathless. I have approached the compositions that I have written in different ways. I could say that writing every one of them was a unique, unrepeatable adventure of the spirit. When listening to some of my compositions after completing them, I realized that my interaction with them continues. They became, in a way, a sort of a mirror. I started to notice things I wasn’t aware of when I was writing them. In one moment, a door to the past has opened. I clearly saw in many of my compositions that intriguing elements sprouted from the fascinations of my early childhood. Well, let’s go through that door. We are entering my father’s atelier. We’re on the ninth, last floor of a skyscraper of block 45 in New Belgrade. Fifty square meters with two big terraces, full of books and paintings by my father and many other artists. It’s where I lived for the first fourteen years of my life, with my parents and my older sister. Of course, there was always some long-term guest around the place. The tremendous flow of people and ideas, galleries of characters: painters, writers, collectors, art dealers, dissidents, believers… My mother was a professor and French language translator, my father is a writer and a painter, founder and theoretician of Mediala movement that left a significant trace on contemporary Serbian art of painting. My sister also became a painter. I would have probably become a painter too if I hadn’t almost completely lost my eyesight at the age of fourteen. In ex-Yugoslavia, living space was, and still is a problem for a good number of people. It was my family’s problem, too. We didn’t have an apartment, and, as I said earlier, I grew up in my father’s atelier. My mother had a job, and my father was a freelancer and he worked and raised my sister and me in his atelier. I never went to kindergarten, and I spent a lot of time with my father. We had long conversations and I’d watch him paint, and sometimes I’d paint with him. Everything was full of his paintings, paintings by other authors, and mountains of books that were everywhere, from floor to ceiling – about fifteen thousand books. Thinking about it now, it’s difficult to understand how all of that, us included, had fit in such a small space. At that time, paintings, not books, had a greater impact on me. Although the books were everywhere, they stayed unopened for me for a long time. Eventually, when I was nineteen after I finished the high school, the world of books and literature started to open in front of me, and I became an avid reader. To this day, while I’m reading, time and space vanish as I enter the book, and through books, I enter into other worlds and timelines. I often have to restrain myself from reading while I’m taking care of “this world’s” business. When a book takes me over, I’m often not able to control myself and I don’t leave it until it’s finished, no matter how long it takes. It’s dangerous, like any other strong passion: it is a form of addiction. But still, while absorbing books deep inside me, I was developing as a composer. I think it was Mahler who said that it’s more important for a composer to read works of great writers than to study harmony and counterpoint. I completely agree with that. Dostoyevsky, Balzac, Proust, Joyce, Hamsun, Borges and many others, they were for me the real teachers of composing in many aspects. But reading wasn’t the passion of my childhood. Books were objects for me before they “opened”. I remember some bibliographic editions – that were really nice even just to look at. Instead of reading, I remember long conversations with my father. At that time, he orally transferred the knowledge from the books to me. Later, when I started to be addicted to books, the process of reading became auditory, and not visual, considering I almost completely lost eyesight. I don’t perceive the written word by looking at it, but by listening to it. Through reading, or rather listening to books, I absorbed the music of the language they were written in. For a long time, I used to read books written or translated to Serbian and Croatian. When I learned English, I started to listen in English a lot. Languages in their spoken form carry their music. Every language has its own specific rhythm and melody. Intonation in diction contributes to dramatic suspense. The music of a language is an area that intrigues me as a composer. Lately, as I’m learning Dutch, I listen to books in Dutch: literature for children. These books are the best for learning a language, and they are taking me back to my childhood. I’m reading Toon Tellegen’s books, stories about Jip and Janneke, Alice in Wonderland, The Little Prince – I have the whole collection of the Little Prince in Dutch, Croatian, French, German and Russian. I don’t recall reading The Little Prince as a child, but I remember that it was in my library: I remember the front page illustration and the illustration of the snake that has swallowed the elephant. Antoine de Saint-Exupery said that he would have maybe become a painter if grown-up people hadn’t have talked him out of it. He became a writer. Or, maybe, a pilot. And I would have, maybe, become a painter if I haven’t had lost my eyesight. I became a composer. Or am I, maybe, a writer? Yes, at this moment I’m a writer, or otherwise, I wouldn’t write. This text I’m writing as a writer. Literature has the power to easily take us to distant times and places. So let’s fly to Geneva. While in Geneva, at one of my father’s exhibitions, I received my first Casio synthesizer as a present from his art dealer. During our next summer vacation on island Solta, at the time of filming the movie The Fall of Italy, one Czech director has heard me playing on my small synth, and told my parents that I’m a born musician and they should provide me music education. They listened to his advice, bought me a pianino, and at the age of eight, I have started with private piano lessons. During my playing, I’ve spent much more time improvising than learning the official curriculum. One of the reasons could be my poor sight from the time of my birth. I always used to read quite slowly, and reading of both text and notes was tiring for my eyes. The music I would need to play I have always learned by heart. The bad eyesight was slowing my learning and made it more difficult, but on the other hand, by learning the music by heart, it has become carved deeper in me that way. Bad sight probably also influenced the specific way of drawing and painting which at the time were still in the focus of my boyish passions. Figures and objects didn’t have clear edges and contours, they were rather perceived through their shadows. My childhood seems far away to me. A long time ago. As I’m writing about it now, it feels like it’s not my childhood, it feels more like a fiction. At moments when some memories pay me a visit, they feel like memories of past life. I connect the time of my childhood with space I lived in and grew up in: my father’s atelier. After that we’ve had an apartment in the center of Belgrade, I’ve enrolled myself into the high school for studying medical physiotherapy, and music gymnasium “Josip Slavenski”, which I have eventually graduated from, unlike the first one. During that time I have founded a rock band, I’ve started to lose my eyesight rapidly, and at the same time, the turbulent times in Serbia have started: the war was coming. Childhood is over. No more long bicycle rides along the river Sava, my trainings and preparations for black belt in karate are halted. Painting and drawing isn’t possible for me anymore. The only thing left is music. At least that’s what I thought. At the time, it was the truth. At the age of fifteen, I’ve started to compose. Until the age of nineteen, I never wrote down my compositions: I knew them by heart. Time erased them from my memory, only some motives and rough pictures about them remained. However, during that time I have firmly decided to become a composer. Punta corrente for solo piano is my first written composition. It’s a three-part composition of a-b-a1 form. I dictated it to my mother on a cape Punta Corrente near Rovinj. It’s a location where different winds are colliding. The whole first part was written by my mother’s hand, and she never had any musical education. I was describing to her what a score has to look like, and where should she write every note. Quite a task, considering the complicated texture of that composition. This tells me about sacrifice and faith my mother had in me and the path I had chosen, a lot more now than it did back then. Punta corrente was quite successful, it was performed on a number of concerts and festivals. It was recorded for a CD that was published together with a folder of graphics of painter Josip Zanki. The graphics were inspired by Punta corrente and other compositions from that CD; piano miniatures and a composition for solo organ called Salamander. A very characteristic starting motif of augmented force from Salamander runs through the entire piece. I’d describe it as a rock riff, and more or less the whole introductory part until C grand in a pedal is a fragment that survived from my high school years. That beginning of Salamander is very effective and powerful. I think it carries true youthful energy in itself. All the compositions I have and that are preserved I wrote in Croatia and in the Netherlands. I moved to Croatia during the last year of my high school. I came back to Belgrade for a couple of days to attend my exams and formally finish the high school. The war and the madness of war were in full swing at the time and you could feel it everywhere. I left my hometown against my will. I left a great number of my friends. I moved to Rovinj with my parents. I fell into depression. For six months I almost never left my room. A couple of months before we left Belgrade, my sister went to London and stayed there for thirteen years. A year after we came to Zagreb, I enrolled into Music Academy there, department of organ. I wanted to study composition, but that was a task that needed thorough planning. I needed to find a way to write my music down. I also needed to find the “right” professor. Looking for my professor was a real-life zen story. I regarded studying organ to be the best way to lead me to composing. And so it was. During my fourth year of studying organ, I started to take private lessons with prof. Stanko Horvat. I studied with him for the next five years. At that time I wrote really a lot, and I had several assistants to dictate my compositions too. I’ve then decided to move to the Netherlands. I’ve enrolled into the study of composition in Utrecht. At that time I already felt like a formed composer and studying composition at the Utrechts Conservatorium was at first a way to be able to live in the Netherlands where I wanted to affirm myself as a composer. Nevertheless, studying and learning new things continues throughout life if you are a curious spirit. At Utrecht, I’ve started to study composition with Henk Alkema – a composer, conductor, and jazz pianist. I really feel I had a lot of luck with both my professors of composition, Horvat and Alkema. I established a very deep understanding with both of them, our conversations meant a lot in my development and their advice was always wise: thoughts that will stay with me forever. With Henk, I started to learn conducting which I chose as a minor. Conducting for me opened an entirely new world, much greater than my big expectations. It felt like, for the first time, I am beginning to be aware of my body. It led me to step over many of my physical and psychological limits. I start to feel and emanate the music with my whole body, with my whole being. Awakening. I start to seriously occupy myself with movement. I start to dance, I get to learn about baroque dances, I engage in a type of Japanese contemporary dance or study of movement – Body Weather Laboratory. I started with martial arts again: Aikido and Systema, a Russian martial art that was a big discovery for me. I include exercises from Systema in my private lessons of piano improvisation that I give lately and they bring great results. Dance and a relaxed fight with a smile are becoming a part of my everyday life. The composition De Gekke Dirigent for ensemble of percussions is based on physical action – the patterns of conducting. The movements of conducting are transformed in actions of playing a piano, a vibraphone and a marimba. Also the series of drawings that I made three years ago is also based on action of movements in patterns of conducting, which in that case are expressed in drawing. I thought I will never be able to paint again: through conducting, even that impossible action is open possibility again. I decided to put these drawings at a front page of my scores, to stand before this text, because they paint a true picture of my music and me. Even though I almost completely lost my eyesight, my imagination remained visual. And writing music is, for me, a form of painting. Cords, tones and melody lines have their colours. Most of the times I can see the form of the composition before I start to write it; I can see it as a visual form that is complete at every moment of observing. We can look at the music like we look at a picture. It can contain a story, or a drama. It can be an architecture through which we move, it can be a system of thoughts and ideas. In the same way, some pictures carry powerful music inside, or sometimes silence, that is a precondition and a composing part of music. I think that De Chirico for instance, managed to paint silence better than Cage. On the other hand, Cage is for me more of a philosopher and a poet than a composer. It’s been almost six years since I came out to the streets, to play. I started with bongos, I learned how to play them on the street. I listened to the sounds of the streets, and my bongos were one of the instruments in rich orchestra of different sounds of the city. Later, I started conducting on the streets. I didn’t have an orchestra in front of me, and I wasn’t in the concert hall. The street became my stage, and music was all around me, and I influenced it as a conductor. And I was creating it. I was, at the same time, listener and viewer. In front of me, an opera was unfolding, real, very exciting opera. It was an opera that had me as a main character. I was watching it, creating and performing at the same time. The grandiose idea was born. I have arrived at the peak of feeling and finding that the world around us is a perfect work of art. Many problems that I had at the time were in fact problems that the lead character of my opera had, the character that I have performed a role of. That opera that I wished I had written has a title Veni Non Vidi Vici. It remains unwritten until today. The idea was too grand to turn into reality without great support of society. I’m sure that many topics that I was engaged in while thinking to write the opera will reflect in my future work, and that they already are reflecting. It was a time of great inspiration and intoxication with life in all its aspects. The art has become a part of my every step. I used to be under a strong impression that the art is more real than life itself. For life to gain its higher, or even better, its true meaning, one needs to look at it and experience it like the art. The life needs to be artistic or mystical experience. A danger for me as a creator started to develop at the time of the culmination of my intoxication with what I would call ars vivendi. I think the best way to define it would be this one: with every step and every breath there is something going on which is perfect art in all aspects, it’s already there in perfect form and there is no need to do anything but live with full consciousness. As many real dangers, this one has grown hidden. It was hidden in my “real” problems, or in real problems of the lead character of my opera: by estranging myself from best friends with whom I came to the Netherlands, in tough illness and the death of my mother, in issues with the computers through which I would lose music that I’d be writing. The process of writing itself always demanded a special strategy in order to be fulfilled. While living in Croatia I always had assistants to whom I’d dictate my compositions. After arriving to the Netherlands, it was too expensive to hire assistants for writing notes, so I kept my assistants from Croatia. I dictate my compositions textually and send that by e-mail: they send the scores back to me. This was creating at the border of possible. Fiori Musicali for solo organ and Defloration for symphonic orchestra a due were done that way, during the first year of my living in the Netherlands. The two compositions are a sort of a diptych. They could be classified as “compositions-ideas”. They are minimalistic and they deal with the illusions of perception, the relation between two cords; trompe l’oeil on the auditory plane. Illusions of perception are present in some of my earlier compositions, for instance Jakovljev san for organ and Filius meus for mixed choir. During my second year of studying in Utrecht I’ve obtained notation software for blind people, which makes me independent from my assistants. My computer has been giving me a lot of trouble. Even today, it’s a big source of my frustrations. In one computer crash I lost two almost finished compositions, Ponto and De Gekke Dirigent. Two years ago I reconstructed them from memory and finally finished them. Of course, they are not reconstructed from tone to tone. They were different five years ago. The main ideas and themes are the base from which I reconstructed them. I think, at the end, they came out better than they were. Reconstruction, in different aspects, is the common element for maybe all compositions I wrote so far. It is restoration of past times, of childhood fascinations, lost sight. But with reconstruction, lost things don’t come back the way they were. Something new emerges. Something never seen and never heard. It’s not possible to bathe twice in the same river. My goal is not to bring back the past. My goal is to transform, translate and transfer my personal experiences that inevitably belong to the past, distant or close, into something new. Discovering some worlds that looked new to me, sometimes I would realize that they are actually very old, sometimes even ancient. Nothing’s new under the sun, everything repeats itself. Some discoveries happened several times. I suppose they brought the same sensations into the spirits of explorers. I read recently the testimony of Pascal’s sister. She wrote that Pascal, at the age of eleven discovered Pythagoras theorem. Lovely. Great mathematician and a great spirit. He didn’t learn it, he discovered it. The composition Jakovljev san is based on my discovery of Shepard tone. My inspiration didn’t come from Shepard. I didn’t know about him. It could have come from Esher, who fascinated me as a child and later I probably subconsciously transformed this into music. 

This short text is nearing its end. We’re approaching a cadence, but I feel I still have many things to say. I filter and filter from the rich vault of my memory and experiences. Some important things are just impossible to say. Maybe what’s most important always stays impossible to express and you need to read between the lines. Between these confusing lines of text, maybe you will hear the music that will say something more. Between them is maybe the answer to the question: Who am I? Some things require the whole books to be explained. Some things maybe wouldn’t be so convenient to say. Is this what’s left good enough to present me as a composer and an artist? I don’t really feel comfortable to write about myself as a composer. I hide behind other names, characters and professions. The word “composer” in this text I’ve put in quotation marks. I don’t compose lately as much as I feel I should. It feels like I find myself in many other things in order to escape the real truth. It’s not easy to write about truth. I don’t want to sound immodest and pretentious in this text, but if I would write modestly about myself, it would be false modesty, which is even worse. I do believe in greatness of my ideas and I have not big, but rather great ambitions. I believe that some of my compositions make me a composer for eternity, even if I never write anything anymore. In this sense, I’m ready to die peacefully. But If I still live, I’d like to compose more. I feel like the albatross from Baudelaire’s poem – in the heights of my imagination. While I’m composing, I’m confidently flying and I’m safe, but on the ground, drunken sailors are laughing and mocking me. Yes, that’s the life of a poet. We live in the times when, in most cases, the artist must be his own manager. It’s not my area of expertise. In this, I’m the albatross on a ship deck. I don’t want to look for excuses. I feel ready to change and learn some things: I would like to find the way to you. The way to another level that I haven’t reached yet. At certain moments, I touched it. It’s a level of self-affirmation as an artist in a frame of society. It’s a level of interaction with society, with the audience and with other artists that I need. I’d like that this text doesn’t end up as a monologue, a closed form, a lost message in a bottle. I envision it as an introduction, as a beginning of a dialog and interaction with you, dear reader. This short and very pretentious intro could, indeed, put you off. It could also open your eyes for new horizons, it could make you see yourself and realise that you didn’t know yourself as much as you thought you did. This text has a potential to make you wiser and better. I say this based on feedback from many people who told me that my example, my words and my music changed their lives and enriched them. If nothing else, if you read this text until the end with a faster pace, tempo allegro (with approx. 242 words per minute), after you read it, I guarantee, you’ll be at least 15 minutes older.