Helena Skljarov (Zagreb, January 1993) graduated musicology at Music Academy, University of Zagreb (2017), under the mentorship of Nikša Gligo with a thesis on the analysis of 20th-century music. In 2014. she begins the study of Composition at the same university in the class of professor Berislav Šipuš. In 2018. she won a scholarship from the Croatian Composers Society “Rudolf and Margita Matz”. In 2018. she received the Rector’s award for composition Pulsar which was premiered in Zagreb by students orchestra and conducted by maestro Quentin Hindley. Since she was a student, she participated in various masterclasses. In June 2020 she participated with her string quartet Silence as a composer in residency of Festival d’Aix-en-Provence. She has composed more than 40 compositions for solo instruments, chamber ensembles, orchestra, and two operas. From autumn 2019 she lived and studied in Lyon as an ERASMUS student in the class of professor Martin Matalon. In July 2020 she graduated composition under the mentorship of Berislav Šipuš with her opera Nothing. Almost for vocals, instruments, and electronics, written on the texts of Daniil Kharms. In 2021 her string quartet Silence is selected for the 2021 ISCM World New Music Days in Shanghai and Nanjing. In 2022, she was selected to participate in the Novalis Festival where she won the award for best composition of a young composer. In the same year, she was composer-in-residence at the Ljubljana Festival as part of the Synergy project and part of the Hong Kong Contemporary Music Festival. In November 2022. she had her first multimedia exhibition at Music-Mission-Vision festival in Zagreb. Her work currently includes more than forty compositions for various solo instruments, chamber ensembles, one symphony, and two operas. She is particularly interested in music theatre and interdisciplinary art.
In short…
Graduated: Musicology (analysis of 20th century music) in 2017 and Composition (opera) in 2020
Composition: graduated in Zagreb Conservatoire, ERASMUS program in CNSMD Lyon, currently more than 40 compositios
Current projects and interests: staged compositions, Sound art, fusion of painting and composing
Musicology: since 2017 more than 50 published articles (critics and analyses of contemporary compositions)
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Composition thesis (2020)
Opera Nothing… Almost, Images for vocals, instruments, and electronics. Written on different stories of Daniil Kharms which are in a way connected by its absurd situations. The main idea was to capture Kharms’s absurd humor and try to transfer it into music. In its duration of approx. 40 minutes there are presented different conflicts between four main characters (S, A, T and B) which are changed during the piece. Dramaturgy helps two actors who sometimes comment the action on the stage or simply ‘explain’ them by reading stage directions.
Musicology thesis (2017)
Analysis of Schönberg’s Erwartung entitled ‘Schönberg’s Erwartung as beginning of atonality’. My biggest interest in the field of Musicology is music analysis, especially of 20th and 21st-century music. My mentor, Nikša Gligo, suggested me to write an extensive analysis of Schönberg’s Erwartung since it’s a challenge because there are very few attempts of analysis of this piece. Furthermore, the approach towards it is absolutely new and it requires inventing a new system of analysis as much as most musical pieces (especially the ones written in free atonality) composed after it.
List of my articles available online (in Croatian):
Helena Skljarov 