Đuro Živković

Biography

Đuro Živković (Serbian Cyrillic: Ђуро Живковић) (born 1975) is a Serbian-Swedish composer and violinist. Since 2000 he has been living and working in Stockholm, Sweden.

He has composed a wide range of works including chamber, orchestral and vocal music, music for solo instruments, choral, and just one short electro-acoustic piece.

He studied violin at the Music Academy in Belgrade, and than composition at the same school with Vlastimir trajkovic, and the Royal College of Music in Stockholm under Pär Lindgren, while also taking classes with Bent Sørensen, Magnus Lindberg and workshops with Esa-Pekka Salonen, James Dillon, Mario Davidovsky and Michael Obst.

Živković's style is characterized by fantastic narration, virtuoso instrumentation and stylistic highly profiled sound. In his music he has developed a variety of compositional techniques such as polyrhythmic, improvisation, special harmony based scales, microtones, layer-polyphony and heterophony.

Živković is also a professional violinist, performing new music, as well as improviser on violin and piano. He has received many international scholarships and prizes for his work. He also works as a teacher of composition, music theory & aural training, violin and chamber music.

Awards

• "Eclat de larme" - composition prize at the first pre-art competition in Switzerland, 2005
• "Le Cimetière Marin" - Swedish Grammy Award (Grammis) on Sonanza's CD - 2009
• "Ascetic Discourse" - Mokranjac Award, Serbian State Prize, for the best piece - 2012

Other scholarships

• Swedish Performing Rights Society
• Swedish Arts Grants Committee
• Irino Institute, Japan
• The Royal Swedish Academy of Music

Music

Metaphysical Poem

Sonata for violin and piano, written 1997-98, is a 37-minutes long monolithic oration in five movements. The sonata is entitled metaphysical, stressing thus the composer’s need for meta-levels in music and his thoughts. All movements are played attacca and both instruments have very little rests. The sonata is a step forward from its precedents (Bartok or Shostakovich) in both sound and technique, and is indeed a very serious and complex work. The last movement, Ison, is based on Zivkovic’s early piano improvisations, here added the violin part. The sonata was written during Zivkovic’s studies at the Music Academy in Belgrade, in the class of Vlastimir Trajkovic.

External links

• Djuro Zivkovic - personal