15 MINUTES OLDER

Tempo allegro con fuoco 242 wpm

Forte

Rudjer Glavurtic

If you have the light, you should not keep it where nobody will see it. It should be set on a
high ground, so it can burn for the others too.

I have occupied myself lately with trying to bring order among my compositions, to make
them available to those who want to perform them and listen to them.

It’s not as easy as it looks, given the circumstances that I’ll explain here.

I found almost all the scores that I intend to present. I have the help and encouragement of
Solbjörg Björnsdótter, a singer and a student of art management who I met recently. This
gives me energy to do what I’m doing at the moment, and that’s writing about myself.
Specifically, while talking about presenting and distributing my work, Sol has proposed,
among other things, to put comments next to the scores along with some information about
myself.

As far as the comments to the compositions are concerned, I think that music doesn’t need
explanation in words, that it should speak for itself, although in spite of this I wrote quite a
bit about some of my compositions. These texts grew from comments into something
completely different. They became essays per se, independent literary forms inspired by
musical ones. In short, it seems to me that I don’t know how to write comments to my own
compositions.

As far as the information about the “composer” is concerned, I’ve planned to put in some of
my CVs that I’ve already had ready. But, while reading them, I had a very strong and equally
unpleasant impression that they don’t say anything about me, they don’t say anything about
my music, don’t say anything much about anything at all, even if they are full of facts. So I
decided to write a new introductory text about myself and my relationship with my work. I
would like to write about the compositions in general, without describing them. I’d like to
write something about the process of creation, and about what these works mean to me,
and in the end, about the reason behind my work.

In this short, introductory text, which will stand in front of my compositions I am faced with
a terrifying question: Who am I? I’m afraid I don’t have an answer to that elementary
question. It is what I’m trying to find out. It is a question I will leave open in this text. Any
answer I could give wouldn’t be complete and wouldn’t be final. It seems like the truth and
reality defy any definition I could find. In this text, since I’m writing it as introduction to my
compositions, I should introduce myself as a composer. So, I-composer will be the dominant
element. I have to say something here: I have to be completely immersed into any creative
activity I’m doing, I have to be completely in what, that what I’m doing, to be able to do it at
all. In that sense, in this very moment as I am writing about myself as a composer, I am not a
composer, I’m a writer. In this moment I am creating a literary form. I am a writer who is
writing about a composer. Actually, not only about a composer, but also about a writer, a
painter, an architect, a philosopher. All these roles and activities reflect in the process of my
composing, and through writing about composing I'll write about them as well. However, I
think I can best express my divergent affinities through composing; it is how I can fully
express myself. Composing can contain everything else, and everything else for me can be,
and is, a part of the process of composing. I cannot separate processes of creating and living.
While thinking and writing about any aspect of my creative work, I’ll write about myself:
about my deeper self, about my past. That’s one important reason for my composing and
writing, for doing any other form of creative work. This helps me to discover myself. Creating
is my confrontation and my battle with myself. The process of writing is leading me towards
the answer to that terrible question: Who am I?

I’m on my way. I’m moving. Yes, I’m in constant movement, even when it looks like I’m not.
So far I’ve gone through countless exciting moments: I've escaped death by the skin of my
teeth several times, I often fell and along the way I’ve learned how to fall, and how to deal
with the pain of the blows I have taken. Often, I was tired. Tired of travelling, I wouldn’t
know which way to proceed, but then I would found fantastic landscapes, and enjoy them
while travelling by, or while they would go through me. Everything on this path is temporary,
our sufferings, as well as our joy. Nevertheless, there is a need to keep the things that are
passing by, to own something that is eternal, to not let the time erase some things that we
deem important. People I have met, the events along the way, the ideas that surrounded
me, made an impact on me, consciously and subconsciously. Of course, I made an impact on
them, too, it is always an interaction. They formed me and I formed through them, and
became what I am now. To keep all those moments that have gone by, I record them. I form
something that will last out of them, something that I’d like to share with others. With
someone like me. Creative work opens the possibilities to share some valuable experiences
with someone who might be far away in space and time. Maybe with someone who hasn’t
been even born yet.

The final part of the composition Can You Hear It Now for ensemble of percussions I wrote in
desperate desire to continue my communication with one wonderful woman, once very
close to me, who tragically left this world. Through creation, it’s possible to transform tears
into pearls. I consider Can You Hear It Now, dedicated to Charlotte van Eijkeren, to be one
such pearl among my compositions. At certain times, creative work is an instrument of
healing like none other.

During the process of creation, a miracle happens. Something new is born, something that
until that moment didn’t exist. The creator carries the God’s seed inside. When I think about
it, the act of creation is a miracle that leaves me breathless. I have approached the
compositions that I have written in different ways. I could say that writing every one of them
was a unique, unrepeatable adventure of spirit. When listening to some of my compositions
after completing them, I realized that my interaction with them continues. They became, in a
way, a sort of a mirror. I started to notice things I wasn’t aware of when I was writing them.
In one moment, a door to the past has opened. I clearly saw in many of my compositions
that intriguing elements sprouted from the fascinations of my early childhood. Well, let’s go
through that door.

We are entering my father’s atelier. We’re on the ninth, last floor of a skyscraper of bloc 45
in New Belgrade. Fifty square meters with two big terraces, full of books and paintings by my
father and many other artists. It’s where I lived for the first fourteen years of my life, with
my parents and my older sister. Of course, there was always some long-term guest around
the place. Tremendous flow of people and ideas, galleries of characters: painters, writers,
collectors, art dealers, dissidents, believers… My mother was a professor and French
language translator, my father is a writer and a painter, founder and theoretician of Mediala
movement that left a significant trace on contemporary Serbian art of painting. My sister
also became a painter. I would have probably become a painter too, if I haven’t almost
completely lost my eyesight at the age of fourteen.

In ex-Yugoslavia, living space was, and still is a problem for good number of people. It was
my family’s problem, too. We didn’t have an apartment, and, as I said earlier, I grown up in
my father’s atelier. My mother had a job, and my father was a freelancer and he worked and
raised my sister and me in his atelier. I never went to kindergarten, and I spent a lot of time
with my father. We had long conversations and I’d watch him paint, and sometimes I’d paint
with him. Everything was full of his paintings, paintings by other authors, and mountains of
books that were everywhere, from floor to ceiling - about fifteen thousand books. Thinking
about it now, it’s difficult to understand how all of that, us included, had fit in such a small
space. At that time, paintings, not books, had greater impact on me. Although the books
were everywhere, they stayed unopened for me for a long time. Eventually, when I was
nineteen, after I finished the high school, the world of books and literature started to open
in front of me, and I became an avid reader. To this day, while I’m reading, time and space
vanish as I enter the book, and through books I enter into other worlds and timelines. I often
have to restrain myself from reading while I’m taking care of “this world’s” business. When a
book takes me over, I’m often not able to control myself and I don’t leave it until it’s
finished, no matter how long it takes. It’s dangerous, like any other strong passion: it is a
form of addiction. But still, while absorbing books deep inside me, I was developing as a
composer. I think it was Mahler who said that it’s more important for a composer to read
works of great writers then to study harmony and counterpoint. I completely agree with
that. Dostoyevsky, Balzac, Proust, Joyce, Hamsun, Borges and many others, they were for me
the real teachers of composing in many aspects. But reading wasn’t the passion of my
childhood. Books were objects for me, before they “opened”. I remember some
bibliographic editions - that were really nice even just to look at.

Instead of reading, I remember long conversations with my father. At that time, he orally
transferred the knowledge from the books to me. Later, when I started to be addicted to
books, the process of reading became auditory, and not visual, considering I almost
completely lost eyesight. I don’t perceive the written word by looking at it, but by listening
to it. Through reading, or rather listening to books, I absorbed the music of the language
they were written in. For a long time, I used to read books written or translated to Serbian
and Croatian. When I’ve learned English, I started to listen in English a lot. Languages in their
spoken form carry their music. Every language has its own specific rhythm and melody.
Intonation in diction contributes to dramatic suspense. The music of a language is an area
that intrigues me as a composer. Lately, as I’m learning Dutch, I listen to books in Dutch:
literature for children. These books are the best for learning a language, and they are taking
me back into my childhood. I’m reading Toon Tellegen’s books, stories about Jip and
Janneke, Alice in Wonderland, The Little Prince – I have the whole collection of the Little
Prince in Dutch, Croatian, French, German and Russian. I don’t recall reading The Little Prince
as a child, but I remember that it was in my library: I remember the front page illustration
and the illustration of the snake that has swallowed the elephant. Antoine de Saint-Exupery
said that he would have maybe become a painter if grown up people hadn’t have talked him
out of it. He became a writer. Or, maybe, a pilot. And I would have, maybe, become a painter
if I haven’t had lost my eyesight. I became a composer. Or am I, maybe, a writer? Yes, at this
moment I’m a writer, or otherwise I wouldn’t write. This text I’m writing as a writer.
Literature has the power to easily take us to distant times and places. So let’s fly to Geneva.

While in Geneva, at one of my fathers exhibitions, I received my first Casio synthesizer as a

present from his art dealer. During our next summer vacation on island Solta, at the time of
filming the movie The Fall of Italy, one Czech director has heard me playing on my small
synth, and told my parents that I’m a born musician and they should provide me music
education. They listened to his advice, bought me a pianino, and at the age of eight I have
started with private piano lessons. During my playing, I’ve spent much more time
improvising than learning the official curriculum. One of the reasons could be my poor sight
from the time of my birth. I always used to read quite slowly, and reading of both text and
notes was tiring for my eyes. The music I would need to play I have always learned by hart.
The bad eyesight was slowing my learning, and made it more difficult, but on the other hand,
by learning the music by heart, it has become carved deeper in me that way. Bad sight
probably also influenced the specific way of drawing and painting which at the time were
still in the focus of my boyish passions. Figures and objects didn’t have clear edges and
contours, they were rather perceived through their shadows.

My childhood seems far away to me. Long time ago. As I’m writing about it now, it feels like
it’s not my childhood, it feels more like a fiction. At moments when some memories pay me
a visit they feel like memories of past life. I connect the time of my childhood with the space
I lived in and grew up in: my father’s atelier. After that we’ve had an apartment in the center
of Belgrade, I’ve enrolled myself into the high school for studying medical physiotherapy,
and music gymnasium “Josip Slavenski”, which I have eventually graduated from, unlike the
first one. During that time I have founded a rock band, I’ve started to lose my eyesight
rapidly, and at the same time, the turbulent times in Serbia have started: the war was
coming. Childhood is over. No more long bicycle rides along the river Sava, my trainings and
preparations for black belt in karate are halted. Painting and drawing isn’t possible for me
anymore. The only thing left is music. At least that’s what I thought. At the time, it was the
truth. At the age of fifteen I’ve started to compose. Until the age of nineteen I never wrote
down my compositions: I knew them by hart. Time erased them from my memory, only
some motives and rough pictures about them remained. However, during that time I have
firmly decided to become a composer.

Punta corrente for solo piano is my first written composition. It’s a three-part composition of
a-b-a1 form. I dictated it to my mother on a cape Punta Corrente near Rovinj. It’s a location
where different winds are colliding. The whole first part was written by my mother’s hand,
and she never had any musical education. I was describing to her what a score has to look
like, and where should she write every note. Quite a task, considering the complicated
texture of that composition. This tells me about sacrifice and faith my mother had in me and
the path I had chosen, a lot more now than it did back then. Punta corrente was quite
successful, it was performed on a number of concerts and festivals. It was recorded for a CD
that was published together with a folder of graphics of painter Josip Zanki. The graphics
were inspired by Punta corrente and other compositions from that CD; piano miniatures and
a composition for solo organ called Salamander. A very characteristic starting motif of
augmented force from Salamander runs through the entire piece. I’d describe it as a rock riff,
and more or less the whole introductory part until C grand in a pedal is a fragment that
survived from my high school years. That beginning of Salamander is very effective and
powerful. I think it carries true youthful energy in itself.

All the compositions I have and that are preserved I wrote in Croatia and in the Netherlands.
I moved to Croatia during the last year of my high school. I came back to Belgrade for a
couple of days to attend my exams and formally finish the high school. The war and the
madness of war were in full swing at the time and you could feel it everywhere. I left my
hometown against my will. I left great number of my friends. I moved to Rovinj with my
parents. I fell into depression. For six months I almost never left my room. A couple of
months before we left Belgrade, my sister went to London, and stayed there for thirteen
years. A year after we came to Zagreb, I enrolled into Music Academy there, department of
organ. I wanted to study composition, but that was a task that needed thorough planning. I
needed to find a way to write my music down. I also needed to find the “right” professor.
Looking for my professor was a real-life zen story. I regarded studying organ to be the best
way to lead me to composing. And so it was. During my fourth year of studying organ, I
started to take private lessons with prof. Stanko Horvat. I studied with him for the next five
years. At that time I wrote really a lot, and I had several assistants to dictate my
compositions to.

I’ve then decided to move to the Netherlands. I’ve enrolled into the study of composition in
Utrecht. At that time I already felt like a formed composer and studying composition at the
Utrechts Conservatorium was at first a way to be able to live in the Netherlands where I
wanted to affirm myself as a composer. Nevertheless, studying and learning new things
continues throughout life if you are a curious spirit. At Utrecht, I’ve started to study
composition with Henk Alkema - a composer, conductor and jazz pianist. I really feel I had a
lot of luck with both my professors of composition, Horvat and Alkema. I established very
deep understanding with both of them, our conversations meant a lot in my development
and their advice was always wise: thoughts that will stay with me forever.

With Henk, I started to learn conducting which I chose as a minor. Conducting for me
opened an entirely new world, much greater than my big expectations. It felt like, for the
first time, I am beginning to be aware of my body. It led me to step over many of my physical
and psychological limits. I start to feel and emanate the music with my whole body, with my
whole being. Awakening. I start to seriously occupy myself with movement. I start to dance, I
get to learn about baroque dances, I engage in a type of Japanese contemporary dance or
study of movement - Body Weather Laboratory. I started with martial arts again: Aikido and
Systema, a Russian martial art that was a big discovery for me. I include exercises from
Systema in my private lessons of piano improvisation that I give lately and they bring great
results. Dance and a relaxed fight with a smile are becoming a part of my everyday life. The
composition De Gekke Dirigent for ensemble of percussions is based on physical action – the
patterns of conducting. The movements of conducting are transformed in actions of playing
a piano, a vibraphone and a marimba. Also the series of drawings that I made three years
ago is also based on action of movements in patterns of conducting, which in that case are
expressed in drawing. I thought I will never be able to paint again: through conducting, even
that impossible action is open possibility again. I decided to put these drawings at a front
page of my scores, to stand before this text, because they paint a true picture of my music
and me. Even though I almost completely lost my eyesight, my imagination remained visual.
And writing music is, for me, a form of painting. Cords, tones and melody lines have their
colours. Most of the times I can see the form of the composition before I start to write it; I
can see it as a visual form that is complete at every moment of observing. We can look at the
music like we look at a picture. It can contain a story, or a drama. It can be an architecture
through which we move, it can be a system of thoughts and ideas. In the same way, some
pictures carry powerful music inside, or sometimes silence, that is a precondition and a
composing part of music. I think that De Chirico for instance, managed to paint silence better
than Cage. On the other hand, Cage is for me more of a philosopher and a poet than a
composer.

It’s been almost six years since I came out to the streets, to play. I started with bongos, I
learned how to play them on the street. I listened to the sounds of the streets, and my
bongos were one of the instruments in rich orchestra of different sounds of the city. Later, I
started conducting on the streets. I didn’t have an orchestra in front of me, and I wasn’t in
the concert hall. The street became my stage, and music was all around me, and I influenced
it as a conductor. And I was creating it. I was, at the same time, listener and viewer. In front
of me, an opera was unfolding, real, very exciting opera. It was an opera that had me as a
main character. I was watching it, creating and performing at the same time. The grandiose
idea was born. I have arrived at the peak of feeling and finding that the world around us is a
perfect work of art. Many problems that I had at the time were in fact problems that the
lead character of my opera had, the character that I have performed a role of. That opera
that I wished I had written has a title Veni Non Vidi Vici. It remains unwritten until today. The
idea was too grand to turn into reality without great support of society. I’m sure that many
topics that I was engaged in while thinking to write the opera will reflect in my future work,
and that they already are reflecting. It was a time of great inspiration and intoxication with
life in all its aspects. The art has become a part of my every step. I used to be under a strong
impression that the art is more real than life itself. For life to gain its higher, or even better,
its true meaning, one needs to look at it and experience it like the art. The life needs to be
artistic or mystical experience.

A danger for me as a creator started to develop at the time of the culmination of my

intoxication with what I would call ars vivendi. I think the best way to define it would be this
one: with every step and every breath there is something going on which is perfect art in all
aspects, it’s already there in perfect form and there is no need to do anything but live with
full consciousness. As many real dangers, this one has grown hidden. It was hidden in my
“real” problems, or in real problems of the lead character of my opera: by estranging myself
from best friends with whom I came to the Netherlands, in tough illness and the death of my
mother, in issues with the computers through which I would lose music that I’d be writing.

The process of writing itself always demanded a special strategy in order to be fulfilled.
While living in Croatia I always had assistants to whom I’d dictate my compositions.

After arriving to the Netherlands, it was too expensive to hire assistants for writing notes, so
I kept my assistants from Croatia. I dictate my compositions textually and send that by e-
mail: they send the scores back to me. This was creating at the border of possible. Fiori
Musicali for solo organ and Defloration for symphonic orchestra a due were done that way,
during the first year of my living in the Netherlands. The two compositions are a sort of a
diptych. They could be classified as “compositions-ideas”. They are minimalistic and they
deal with the illusions of perception, the relation between two cords; trompe l'oeil on the
auditory plane. Illusions of perception are present in some of my earlier compositions, for
instance Jakovljev san for organ and Filius meus for mixed choir.

During my second year of studying in Utrecht I’ve obtained notation software for blind
people, which makes me independent from my assistants. My computer has been giving me
a lot of trouble. Even today, it’s a big source of my frustrations. In one computer crash I lost
two almost finished compositions, Ponto and De Gekke Dirigent. Two years ago I
reconstructed them from memory and finally finished them. Of course, they are not
reconstructed from tone to tone. They were different five years ago. The main ideas and
themes are the base from which I reconstructed them. I think, at the end, they came out
better than they were. Reconstruction, in different aspects, is the common element for
maybe all compositions I wrote so far. It is restoration of past times, of childhood
fascinations, lost sight. But with reconstruction, lost things don’t come back the way they
were. Something new emerges. Something never seen and never heard. It’s not possible to
bathe twice in the same river. My goal is not to bring back the past. My goal is to transform,
translate and transfer my personal experiences that inevitably belong to the past, distant or
close, into something new. Discovering some worlds that looked new to me, sometimes I
would realize that they are actually very old, sometimes even ancient. Nothing’s new under
the sun, everything repeats itself. Some discoveries happened several times. I suppose they
brought the same sensations into the spirits of explorers. I read recently the testimony of
Pascal’s sister. She wrote that Pascal, at the age of eleven discovered Pythagoras theorem.
Lovely. Great mathematician and a great spirit. He didn’t learn it, he discovered it. The
composition Jakovljev san is based on my discovery of Shepard tone. My inspiration didn’t
come from Shepard. I didn’t know about him. It could have come from Esher, who fascinated
me as a child and later I probably subconsciously transformed this into music.

This short text is nearing its end. We’re approaching a cadence, but I feel I still have many
things to say. I filter and filter from the rich vault of my memory and experiences. Some
important things are just impossible to say. Maybe what’s most important always stays
impossible to express and you need to read between the lines. Between these confusing
lines of text, maybe you will hear the music that will say something more. Between them is
maybe the answer to the question: Who am I? Some things require the whole books to be
explained. Some things maybe wouldn’t be so convenient to say. Is this what’s left good
enough to present me as a composer and an artist?
I don’t really feel comfortable to write about myself as a composer. I hide behind other
names, characters and professions. The word “composer” in this text I’ve put in quotation
marks. I don’t compose lately as much as I feel I should. It feels like I find myself in many
other things in order to escape the real truth. It’s not easy to write about truth. I don’t want
to sound immodest and pretentious in this text, but if I would write modestly about myself,
it would be false modesty, which is even worse. I do believe in greatness of my ideas and I
have not big, but rather greatest ambitions. I believe that some of my compositions make
me a composer for eternity, even if I never write anything anymore. In this sense, I’m ready
to die peacefully. But If I still live, I’d like to compose more.

I feel like the albatross from Baudelaire's poem - in the heights of my imagination. While I’m
composing, I’m confidently flying and I’m safe, but on the ground, drunken sailors are
laughing and mocking me. Yes, that’s the life of a poet.

We live in the times when, in most cases, the artist must be his own manager. It’s not my
area of expertise. In this, I’m the albatross on a ship deck. I don’t want to look for excuses. I
feel ready to change and learn some things: I would like to find the way to you. The way to
another level that I haven’t reached yet. At certain moments, I touched it. It’s a level of self-
affirmation as an artist in a frame of society. It’s a level of interaction with society, with the
audience and with other artists that I need.

I’d like that this text doesn’t end up as a monologue, a closed form, a lost message in a
bottle. I envision it as an introduction, as a beginning of a dialog and interaction with you,
dear reader. This short and very pretentious intro could, indeed, put you off. It could also
open your eyes for new horizons, it could make you see yourself and realize that you didn’t
know yourself as much as you thought you did. This text has a potential to make you wiser
and better. I say this based on feedback from many people who told me that my example,
my words and my music changed their lives and enriched them. If nothing else, if you read
this text until the end with a faster pace, tempo allegro (with approx.. 242 words per
minute), after you read it, I guarantee, you’ll be at least 15 minutes older.