Mirela Ivicevic (b. 1980) is a Croatian composer living in Vienna. She is a co-founding member of the Black Page Orchestra, a contemporary music ensemble based in Vienna. Ivicevic's Album ‘Scarlet Songs’, released by Kairos, includes a selection of pieces composed between 2014 and 2019 for large and small ensemble configurations performed by Klangforum Wien, one of Europe's leading contemporary music ensembles, and the Black Page Orchestra, an up-and-coming contemporary music ensemble focusing on electroacoustic and mixed-media works by young composers. Ivicevic's musical writing is highly differentiated, ranging from the use of dense sustained sonorities to more rhythmically driven multi-instrumental gestures; from timbrally diverse granular textures to repetitive segments with a clearly articulated rhythmic/melodic profile; from a contemporary music idiom to the incorporation of elements from free jazz, improvisation and post-rock. Ivicevic's music moves seamlessly between referential spaces. The rhythmic insistence in her music is a driving force in the unfolding of the music, creating expectation through mechanistic repetition and surprising the listener with sudden changes, additions or reconfigurations. The composer writes about her music: ‘My work focuses mainly on exploration of reflective and subversive potential of sound, using bits and pieces of reality, abducted from their natural environment into a surreal acoustic world, resulting mostly in the patchwork of abruptly exchanging, hyperactive structures, distorted occurrences of post-yugoslavian reality, blocks of noise and traces of trip / hop? pop?’Footnote ¹

The pieces on the album, albeit different in their individual unfolding, share procedural strategies through the use of repetitive patterns as elementary building blocks of the musical discourse. The opening piece, CASE WHITE, from 2018, performed by Klangforum Wien, starts with a striking dynamic texture combining several instruments, among which the fast tremolo of the strings in the high register stands out. The section gives way to a more transparent repetitive section with traces of elements present in the opening texture. The beginning texture returns, creating a sense of a large-scale repetition, but this time the subsequent section develops further. The piece unfolds in a somewhat episodic presentation of repeating musical gestures. Ivicevic's writing focuses on the use of different instrumental actions to create rich multi-instrumental gestures with a clear rhythmic profile. The use of repeated segments made by such multi-instrumental gestures to create a developing musical drive is a central aspect of the composition. The music presents the listener with a constantly changing relationship between expectation and surprise. The segments unravel often in contrasting ways; however, the music never lingers long in a single sonority, keeping a constant degree of change.

The second piece on the album, The F sonG, for ensemble and live electronics, performed by The Black Page Orchestra, begins with a masterful timbral articulation of a sustained pitch in the middle range comprised of repeating instrumental patterns of different lengths and an electronically produced sustained pitch. With each repetition, and following an anticipatory gesture, new sonorities are introduced, gradually adding new timbres and pitches to the repeating sequence. A sense of rhythm is instilled in the listener. The introduction of new sounds contributes to the discursive unfolding of the instrumental gestures that leads to a climatic section with sharp clusters in the low register of the piano, overblowing sounds of the flute and the saxophone culminating in loudly distorted electronic sonorities. The rhythmic and repetitive nature of the music is contrasted with wall-of-sound-like sonorities creating something more textural, combining electronic bursts and chirps with extended instrumental actions. The tablecloth has been swept from under the listener; the seeming regularity of the previous segments is replaced with granular sonorities of different consistency and duration in a staged erratic fashion.

The gradual evolution of the instrumental writing is clearly audible, with a tendency towards sophistication of the musical material and differentiation between sections. The third piece, Lilith's New Toy, from 2017, performed by the Black Page Orchestra, foreshadows the highly nuanced and intricate instrumental writing of the large ensemble piece but on a smaller scale. Ivicevic composes music that makes use of compelling ‘fleeting’ gestures combining very different instruments, often using timbre as a differentiator; at other times, instrumental timbre is used to enrich the particular texture or musical passage. A striking example of this is the rich timbral interplay at the beginning of the fourth piece, Sweet Dreams, from 2019, performed by Klangforum Wien. The opening texture combines fast figurations of piano, xylophone and fast string tremoli in the high register, accompanied by sustained pitches by brass instruments in addition to a pulsating layer of additional brass instruments. The layering of elements of different lengths to create larger repeating units creates a musical texture with a mix of both static and dynamic elements.

Mirela Ivicevic's instrumental writing makes great use of timbral similarities and differences to create compelling musical gestures and passages. The combination of inventive musical gestures and masterful orchestration resulting in the repurposing and reconfiguration of musical materials to create new musical phrases in a kaleidoscopic-like manner is a striking characteristic of her music. The pacing of the different changes instils expectation in the listener, both in terms of expected return and sudden change. The degree and quality of change between different sections are elements of great importance in Ivicevic's music. Sometimes, the musical materials reconfigure and reshape the rhythmic texture; at other times, a section builds up and culminates in a new sonic space. Every piece on the album moves around a given set of musical spaces, which are traversed as the music unfolds. Some sections are traversed linearly, and others reappear later on, creating a sense of a cyclical motion. Additionally, every piece introduces a sonic ‘other’, which in most cases appears towards the end of the piece. This sonic other presents a very different referential space that puts the preceding music in perspective. An example of this is the introduction of harmonic progressions reminiscent of film music in some passages. Another takes place in the last piece of the album, CASE BLACK, from 2016, performed by the Black Page Orchestra. The incorporation of musical elements considered to lie outside of the referential space of contemporary classical music shakes the listener and recontextualises everything that has preceded it. The interplay between harsh electronic sonorities and noise-like instrumental textures with passages of harmonic and melodic quality creates a multi-genre musical patchwork; the episodic becomes multi-referential. The coda of CASE BLACK reveals a harmonic sequence played in an arpeggio figuration on e-guitar with a melodic bass melody in pizzicati and a soprano melodic line played by the flute. The revelation, albeit somewhat prepared throughout the piece through the gradual insertion of e-guitar licks and harmonic shifts, is quite successful in achieving an expected twist at the end of the piece. The explicit fleshing out of the pop–rock-sounding arrangement unravels somewhat unexpectedly and creates an interesting reconfiguration of the listening experience. Placing this piece last creates a large-scale closing section: a quite satisfying conclusion to the album.