Nemanja Radivojević

Nemanja Radivojević

After graduating in guitar at the Academy of the Arts in Novi Sad, Nemanja Radivojević pursued his studies in Geneva (MA in theory of music) and in Bern (MA in Composition, with Xavier Dayer. He completed his education with a specialised Master program in Research on the Arts at the Institute of Musicology of the University of Bern, under the tutorat by Prof. Dr. Anselm Gerhard.
His compositions have been performed by the ensembles Neue Vokalsolisten, Trio Accanto, MDI, Suono Giallo, Boston New Music Initiative, Proton Bern, Vortex, Oerknal!, Lucerne Festival Alumni Ensemble, Recherche, Asko/Schönberg, Interface, Contrechamps, AdHOC Ensemble, Ensemble Studio 6, Gradilište, Matka, Polygon, clarinetist Richard Haynes and guitarist Ruben Mattia Santorsa.
Radivojević’s music has been presented at the festivals such as Lavaux Classic in Cully, Festival Archipel in Geneva, Lucerne Summer Festival, Opening Festival in Trier, Cluj Modern Festival, Belgrade International Review of Composers, Musikfestival in Bern, Les rencontres d’été in Villeneuve-lès-Avignon, Delian Academy for New Music in Mykonos.
Radivojevic currently works as assistant at the Composition Department at the University of Music in Bern.
In his musicological and theoretical research during his studies, his field of interest include the problematic of time in Gérard Grisey and Luigi Nono, questions of harmonic fields in Berio and Boulez, as well as timbre in the writings by Jean-Claude Risset.
Beside his composing and researcher activity, Radivojevic has been active as music critic in the Swiss music journal for research and creation Dissonance, as well as in Swiss music journal (Schweizer Musikzeitung).

Supervisors

Prof. Dr. Anselm Gerhard, Universität Bern, Institut für Musikwissenschaft
Prof. Dr. Roman Brotbeck, Hochschule der Künste Bern HKB

Doctoral project

The role of microintervals in the work of Jean-Claude Risset

Despite the fact that microintervals present the constitutive elements of the digital sound synthesis (the internal micro-intervallic relations of the spectrum’s partials determine the timbre of the sound), Jean-Claude Risset was never considered as a microintervals composer. My research paper proposes a reevaluation of Risset’s work in the perspective of microintervals. Although they are constantly present in Risset’s sound synthesis processes, they sometimes end up not being perceptible as such, but as a specific sound quality. It is however important to discerne Risset’s work with inharmonic, artificially built spectra (p.ex. of the bells), where the microintervals are clearly perceivable as the alienation of the harmonic series. My research paper relies on the fact, until today not pointed out in the existing body of work on the subject, that Risset worked with the microintervals not only in the context of sound synthesis: besides his exploration the possibilities of escaping the equidistant halftone temperament, experiments with the historic temperaments (Pythagoras, Zarlino) and extensive work on the theories of sound perception by Hermann von Helmholtz, in many of his compositions he used clearly perceptible micro-intervals in melodic and harmony motion. The main subject of the research paper is the relation between these different modes of dealing with the microintervals.

Research priorities

History, aesthetics and analysis of electronic music, digital sound synthesis, spectral music, non-equidistant microtonal music, Jean-Claude Risset