Bojana Šaljic Podešva – ZVO.ČI.TI (So.und.ing) 2010

BOJANA ŠALJIĆ PODEŠVA Bojana Šaljić Podešva, a composer of electroacoustic music, music for acoustic instruments, contemporary theatre, puppet theatre, film, and dance, is not only one of the few female makers in these areas, but also one of the few composers of electroacoustic music following the tradition of musique concrete in general in Slovenia. She is a member of the Society of Slovene Composers – Section for Electroacoustic Music and is, along Bor Turel, also one of the most visible representatives of this genre in Slovenia. Šaljić studied music in secondary schools in Maribor and Ljubljana and later at the Academy of Music in Ljubljana. Already during her studies, she was the recipient of many awards and scholarships, which brought her, among other, also to the Gaudeamus Music Week in Amsterdam. She completed her postgraduate studies in electroacoustic music in Vienna and later received many scholarships and attended numerous international residencies, for example, in Switzerland, Sweden, and France. Her work has been widely presented in international festivals and on home stages. Šaljić readily says about her work in electroacoustic music that it is committed to ‘allowing a certain Music to be born, music that wants to bring colour to a piece of this world. I find ways to do this by immersing myself into Sound that I form and which forms me, purely physically and with the energy it gives’. This slightly romantic aspect can be identified, for example, in the electroacoustic composition for accordion and magnetic tape ‘Meditation on Presence’, performed by the young accordionist Luka Juhart. ‘Meditation on Presence’ by Bojana Šaljić Podešva addresses us with a subtle fusion, intertwinement of live instrumental sound and electroacoustic sounds, which are blending into a soft sound language, in itself characterised as a meditation on presence, on that elusively intangible, unnameable tissue that binds us together in an inevitable gap between the subjects. This language is full of ‘unusual’ instrumentalist procedures, which pull the accordion away from its historical sound landscape and transform it into a sound object, on and over which sounds and noises are produced using different manoeuvres. Juhart, responsively and susceptibly ‘tracing the sound’, succeeded to bring out of this intertwinement a hidden, but shimmering emotive layer of the piece, which evasively radiates from the composition. And this quality is scarcely ever to be found in electroacoustic music. This insight can be attached to many Šaljić’s compositions, for example, to a more recent work, ‘So Close’, performed by Bojana Šaljić Podešva and a young saxophonist Maja Lisac. In 2006, Šaljić presented nine of her electroacoustic compositions from the period from 2000 to 2005 in an album ‘Welcome to the Dushaland’: some are rounded compositions; others originate from sound or multimedia installations. A programme-like writing on the cover of her album reads: ‘With what can I reach the events which will shake foundations and make the axioms questionable? … There are still a lot of potential combinations. Undoubtedly, information is still coming’. We can understand this as a unique ethos and a wager, which is like a breath of fresh air in the undernourished space of contemporary music in Slovenia. Bojana Šaljić Podešva industriously puts this wager into action by collaborating with younger Slovene musicians, video artists, dancers, theatre directors, and electronic music makers. In the music area, she has collaborated with a colleague, composer Aldo Kumar on the one hand, and with a member of the duet Random Logic and the author of the project Medvedek Robotek (Teddy-bear Robot) Gregor Zemljič on the other. In theatre, she collaborated with Silvan Omerzu in many of his performances, also with Janez Pipan; in dance, with Katja Kosi, Ann Adamović, and Mojca Klemenčič; and in multimedia, with Boštjan Bugarič and Miloš Bartol. The latter three and Bojana are memb