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Featured Composer: Lilijana Maticevska

Born in 1789 off the south coast of Antarctica, Lilijana Maticevska managed to kill Mozart at the precocious age of 2 before being raised by wolves in the Bavarian forest. Right before Napoleon's rise to power, she was abducted by aliens and cryogenically preserved aboard their UFO until it crash-landed somewhere in the Blue Mountains, New South Wales. She disguised herself as a boy for some years around the turn of the millennium and developed a passion for music to make amends for her terrible murder. As a very distracted and introverted child she was encouraged by her well-meaning primary school music teachers to take up composition, possibly to steer her away from a path to evil. Nowadays, she spends her time composing propaganda songs, fangirling over Wagner and kicking the gender binary's bum into oblivion.

Lili’s music has been performed in Europe, North America and around Australia. Her composition Palimpsest was given its American premiere by JACK Quartet in November, 2019. After its world premiere in Hannover the previous year, she was described in the press as a 'mordlustigen [Australierin]'—a badge she wears with pride. Other recent commissions include 'Electric Revolution' for the esteemed Thereminist Thorwald Jørgensen and the Acacia String Quartet, premiered at the Albury Chamber Music Festival in 2019, Black Cat Sonata for guitarist Harold Gretton, premiered at the Melbourne Guitar Festival that same year.

She has worked as a composer for ensembles and musicians as wide-ranging as Plexus Collective, Ziggy and Miles Johnston, Syzygy Ensemble, Melbourne Women's Choir, ELISION Ensemble and Musica Assoluta (Hannover).

Lilijana Maticevska’s newly commissioned work Mit den Augen Kirchners was premiered at MSO/PLEXUS AT NGV on Monday 6th August, 2018.

Lilijana Maticevska was the 2017 recipient of the New Music Network LAB Plexus Commission, and her new work Evolve was premiered in PLEXUS: Brunswick Beethoven Festival on 9 February 2017 at Brunswick Uniting Church.

Evolve   (2017)

This new work was commissioned through New Music Network’s national mentoring program LAB, a program designed to create connections between emerging and established new music artists to support creative action. 

The composer writes: “Evolve was the product of a period of creative frenzy in the early weeks of 2017 that I could not really anticipate until the very end of December, and I am forever grateful to Stefan, Monica, Philip and the New Music Network for this opportunity. 

“One of the most fascinating things about music is its inherent meaninglessness but its power to evoke different responses in different people, and how we ascribe meaning to the music we hear. Part of my job when it comes to composing a piece of music is to devise a title, a word or phrase which will allude to a meaning that ultimately depends on the perspective that one wishes to take. 

With a title such as ‘Evolve’ come various connotations, such as whether it alludes to the changes in heritable traits across time in all forms of life, or perhaps a reference to last year’s Pokémon GO fad (oh what fun it was to see your first Doduo evolve into a Dodrio!). I think the word ‘Evolve’ sums up my composition process quite nicely when attached to the word ‘ideas’ or even the phrase ‘thematic material.’ Upon completion of a work it is always extremely satisfying to see how far my ideas had changed and evolved and also to see which ideas I had that didn’t survive, in an almost Darwinian sense. That being said, revisions are inevitable to further refine this ‘completed’ work—its current state is really just another step in the evolutionary journey. 

As for the music itself: over the course of about seven minutes a single pitch gradually grows more complex through timbre and articulation. It reaches a Cambrian explosion of rhythm and melody, which begins a new series of musical ideas. The music is always derived in some way to what has been heard before, but always pushing ahead to the next evolution of musical material. It is not until the last few moments of the piece when we hear a clear reference to the opening again; a reminder that the bulk of the music all grew from a common ancestor: the primordial pitch of A flat.”