TROUBADISC Composers

biography

* 18. March 1909 in Kragujevac
+ 17. September 2003 in Belgrad

Ljubica Maric was born in 1909 in Kragujevac. She is one of the most prominent artists in the history of Serbian contemporary music. After completing her training in Belgrade, where Ljubica Maric combined piano and violin studies with composition lessons from Josip Slavenski, Ljubica Maric pursued her musical education at the State Conservatory in Prague (1929-37), studying composition with Josef Suk and Aloys Hába, and conducting with Nikolay Malko. Her compositions from this period, including the Wind Quintet and Music for Orchestra, influenced by the musical objectives of Schönberg and Hába, where enthusiastically received at concerts in Prague, Amsterdam (ISCM, 1933) and Strasbourg (Music-dramatic symposium with Hermann Scherchen, 1933).
Unfortunately, most of her compositions from this period are lost. After her return to Yugoslavia she taught music theory at the Music Academy of Belgrade. In the years after the Second World War Ljubica Maric devoted herself to researching Serbian folk music and ancient orthodox church music; this enabled her mature compositional style to reach complete expression in the 50’s and 60’s. This was the period of her major compositions: the cantata Songs of Space for choir and Orchestra on texts from epitaphs to 12th-century Bosnian Bogumils; Passacaglia for orchestra; Music of Octoëchos I for orchestra; Byzantine Concerto for piano and orchestra; the cantata Threshold of Dream for soprano, alto, narrator and orchestra, and Ostinato super Thema Octoicha for piano, harp and string orchestra. All these works made an enormous impression on both audiences and critics. At this time Ljubica Maric became a member of the Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences.
The most important characteristic of her work is the specific synthesis of the heritage of folk music, ancient medieval Byzantine musical thought, and a modern sensibility to sound. 'I have learned everything from folk music', Ljubica Maric declared. One of the profound spurces of inspiration contributing to the composer’s specific style is the Octoëchos – a volume of medival Serbian religious songs, based on Byzantine church music and arranged in eight voices (modes) according to their scale structure. Without attempting in any way to restore the musical expression of bygone times, Ljubica Maric sees in the elements which she adopts from the distant past only a meditative stimulus for her own creativity, in which the search for a new sound is a conspicuous characteristic. All her works are beased on the personal philosophy of the composer: 'We always turn to that which we feel to have arisen in the past through a particular creative force, that which is able to live on and to extend through time as an uninterrupted, eternal now. Ths viewed, the present and the past are not opposites – they mutually strengthen one another, developing together and growing into something new.' In the 80’s and 90’s Ljubica Maric devoted herself mainly to chamber music, creating exceptional works (Invocation, Monodia Octoicha, From the Darkness Chanting, Asymptote, Archaia, Torso) which, while plunging in an ever new but recognisable and individual manner into the ancient depths of the past, creatively speaking witness authentically to their own time.
Besides her compositions, the versatile talent of Ljubica Maric is also expressed in her drawings, graphic art and literature (including 'Tablice' [tables], a volume of poetic-philosophic aphorisms).


Lit: Annäherung an 7 Komponistinnen, Bd. 9, hg. v. Clara Mayer, Kassel 1998; there: Borislav Cicovacki, Ljubica Maric: By Silence Darkness Sings about Gold, S. 71f.,
Furore Verlag Kassel ISBN 3-927327-43-3