SPOTLIGHT: Ana Sokolović

Ex-ballerina Ana Sokolović talks theatrics, staying in tune with current society, and calling Montréal home. ‎

Featured music: ‎

Ciaccona‎

…And I Need a Room to Receive Five Thousand People With Raised Glasses… Or… What a Glorious Day / The Birds Are Singing / Halleluia

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
Hello everyone, welcome back to Notes of the North Talks, a series where we get to know

(00:07):
our local Canadian composer talent.
Today I'm here with Ana Sokolović.
Thank you so much Ana for taking the time to speak with me today.
Thank you, Brianna.
First and foremost, I'd love to get to know your background a little better.
So where in Canada do you call home?
This is a very interesting question because I was not born in Canada, but I live in Canada

(00:28):
and I feel as I am home here in Canada.
I can say that Montreal is my home, but I really feel Québec and Canada and the world as
being my place.
I'm lucky enough to say that the world is my home.
I feel comfortable everywhere I travel and for different reasons, but this is somehow

(00:56):
I really feel this sensation of being just a human being.
That's amazing.
Is there any specific place that you feel especially connected to and that may have
especially shaped your work?
This is very interesting.
Of course, I'm coming from the Balkans and this is very important for my music and for

(01:21):
my art and for my expression and for my personality and for my behavior.
So this is really part of my DNA and I cannot get rid of it even if I wanted to.
But at the same time, I feel comfortable as I said in many other physical geographical
spaces for different reasons.
I'm a city dweller.

(01:43):
I like cities, but also I like to visit mountains and go to the forests and
see the nature.
I like heights and I like sea.
The sea is particularly inspiring for me and water in general, maybe because I spent all my summers
on the Adriatic Sea during my childhood.

(02:05):
So yes, sea and water is something which is particularly important for me.
But as I say, what is important is different spaces around me and also people.
People who are filling these spaces are inspiring for me.
I am really in love with human beings and human natures and I try to understand them

(02:31):
from different sides.
And this is something which I love and which inspires me every day.
That's amazing.
So well said.
How did you first get into composition?
I started to do art as a young ballerina.
I did my classical ballet studies.

(02:52):
I started when I was four, imitating my sister who was elder and who already had her ballet
lessons.
I really wanted to imitate her.
She was my idol.
And during the classical ballet classes, I very simply used to go to the piano, that was very important

(03:17):
to the grand piano in the ballet classes room during the pauses to go there and to improvise.
We didn't have a piano at the time at my home.
And I started to play and to improvise during whole pause.
It was interesting that I thought that everyone was doing it.

(03:38):
Later on I started to do music with piano lessons and I was improvising a lot.
So let's say that I didn't know that I was composing, but these improvisations and these
compositions were very natural for me.
So there is no date.
There is maybe moment when I was maybe teenager when I understood that the others didn't do

(04:01):
exactly the same.
So somehow I understood that what I was doing and these compositions and improvisations
were actually somehow part of me and which made me somehow a composer.
That's amazing.
So you have a number of fantastic operatic style works, including Svadba.

(04:22):
What attracts you to stage and opera music?
I think my background was actually important for that, as I just mentioned, I started my
art education as a young ballerina dancer.
And then after I started my piano lessons and parallel to piano lessons and to music

(04:48):
school, I started my theatre lessons where I was engaged for more than 10 years in a
very, very active way.
During my theatre classes, I was a young actress, but also I did some staging.
I composed music.

(05:09):
I did even lights, sonography, costumes, whatever we needed to make our shows.
So all this involvement in different segments of theatre and art actually gave me a profound

(05:30):
curiosity to draw, to make the dramatic lines in everything I was doing.
So without really thinking about stage, even my first compositions, which were for solo
instruments, were somehow impregnated with this dramatic sides, which was very close

(05:53):
to theatre.
So opera came quite naturally, where I actually put all my loves together and where I can
say I express myself in the most organic way I can.
That's lovely.
If you could describe your musical style in three words, what would they be and why?

(06:17):
Energy, rhythm, communication.
Could you elaborate a little bit?
Yes.
So I am coming from the Balkan.
My soul and my body is very rhythmical.
We love, we like life and we like to move and we like to dance and we have this kind

(06:39):
of expressions of everything which is in our bodies.
When we are happy, we are really happy and each cell of our body is vibrating.
When we are sad, we are really sad and each cell of our body is crying.
So I think that these boundaries are really, really large and that's how I'm working.

(07:03):
So let's say that this is part of my personality to be very expressive and to be very energetic.
So rhythm is part also of these incredible rhythms we can find in traditional music on
the Balkans, which is expression of our way of living and our energy we have.

(07:24):
And of course communication is something which I care of, communication with the audience
and communication with the musicians because I'm writing what we call instrumental music,
acoustic music, I'm not writing music using technology, not yet.
I'm working with the real living musicians on the stage and this is very important for

(07:47):
me that I communicate well with them, my ideas and then they are communicating my ideas to
the audience.
And you're able to create such an imaginative atmosphere with the fusion of these driving
rhythms and folk inflections, which is awesome.
What do you think is one of your works that you feel best represents your musical style?

(08:10):
So if the listeners were only to hear one piece of yours, what would you recommend?
This is very difficult to say because there is no one style that I can say I write.
I'm interested in many, many different things, but this opera Svalbard is representative of
one kind of my research which is related to vocal music, which is related somehow to my

(08:34):
background.
So this opera Svalbard, then I can say the rhythm and energy we can find in my piece
for six instruments, Ciacona, or there is 15 instruments music piece called And I Need
a Room to Receive 5,000 People with Raised Glasses or What a Glorious Day the Birds are

(08:57):
Singing Hallelujah.
This is a very long title, my longest title in life and probably I will never do any longer
than that.
But these are rhythmical patterns which I like and which I do myself a lot.
Perfect.
We talked a little bit about how you're connected to Canada.
So has Canada inspired any of your works?

(09:20):
Actually everything I'm talking to you now it's because I felt this liberation from Canada.
So what Canada did to me is that it offered me the possibility to be who I am.
Living in Europe I was always thinking that I should compose in a certain way which was

(09:45):
following the European avant-garde which was very nice and interesting and I was experimenting
a lot but arriving in Canada I somehow found myself in this beautiful place where I can
feel free not only not physically because we are free also in other places in the world

(10:08):
but also this apparently lack of tradition in Canada make us feel comfortable.
I like Europe and I go there to resource but there is so many constraints still even if
it's much less than 50 years ago or 30 years ago even. There is something in Canada which

(10:34):
liberates us and which makes us meeting people coming from different backgrounds who made
Canada, who are part of Canada as I feel part of Canada.
I really feel I'm Canadian and with my friends coming from all over the planet this mosaic

(10:55):
culture society is liberating and making us place where we can really search who we are
and how we want to be to express ourselves.
We are of course influenced by these other cultures which is richness of the specific

(11:18):
cultural background and more than background platform in Canada.
There is absolutely such a liberating environment here while still being inspired by the diversity
that we have here.
Absolutely and now we are talking about diversity and I said yes this is amazing that we already

(11:40):
have good, you know there is of course a lot of things to do but from the beginning I felt
as in home.
Here I travelled in Canada and I was so lucky to go almost everywhere from east to west
to north to south I really covered Canada and this sensation of welcoming is really

(12:09):
amazing.
So the contemporary music scene in Canada and worldwide is very different from say decades
ago even from a few years ago.
What do you see as the future of composition in Canada and how do you think it will evolve?
Composition will never die, I mean music will never die but it will transform and that's

(12:31):
what is happening now.
I cannot predict what will happen but what I know is that it's extremely important that
the music is as any other art and as any other creation relevant to our era.
So using things which we know of today to compose in literal manner or as an inspiration

(13:02):
is very important what it means technology which is around us and terminology which is
around us and thematics which are around us.
So even if I am composing a piece for solo flute I cannot ignore climate changing, I
cannot ignore what's happening in the world, conflicts and some other things so being relevant

(13:28):
that means having energy which is happening in the world and putting it into our compositions.
So composers will continue to compose and I just hope that we will have enough platform
to reach audience because what we have to say it's much more relevant to young people

(13:52):
and to people than composers from the past.
Composers from the past were relevant to their periods and this is amazing that we are still
playing them, this is amazing and we have to continue to play them.
It's like going to a museum you will see baroque paintings or romantic painters but then you

(14:16):
will go and you will see installations of new generation of sculptures and painters.
So this is important to have all of this together to see how people of some other time thought
and to see what we are thinking today, where we are today.

(14:39):
Going with the flow of where society is going.
Exactly and open the society more and more to see what the composers and artists of today
has to say.
I have this at my university, research chair of opera creation and we are doing operas

(15:02):
with augmented reality and virtual reality in order to democratise opera, to reach people
where they can see only with their phones or with their tablets very far away our operas.
So in their home if they cannot move sometimes the people who are sick or some people are

(15:25):
just very far away they cannot come to opera houses but they can watch in their homes with
their tablets, they don't need any headsets or any other complicated technology to watch
it.
So this is one of my goals, it's to reach people and just to communicate what we have

(15:46):
to in common and there is much more we have in common than the audience today from people
from the past.
Very true.
As a final message is there anything you would like to share with young Canadians?
Young Canadians should develop in the way they know they can contribute the best to

(16:11):
the society.
When we are listening to ourselves what are our strengths, more in technology or more
in art or more in this or that, when it's clear for us what we want to do then we can
first of all be happier because we will work what we like to work and because we are spending

(16:31):
many many hours working in our lives so if we are working what we like to do as
Confucius said "if you like what you are doing you will not work during your life, you will never
work."
So in that sense it's better for us but it's better for the society because our contribution

(16:54):
to the society will be much much better.
We are part of society and if society is healthier we will be happier.
Beautiful, what a lovely way to end off.
Thank you so much for taking the time to do this interview,
looking forward to sharing your music with the world.
Thank you Brianna.