Love Canticles

Aleksandra Vrebalov was born September 22, 1970, in Novi Sad, Yugoslavia, and lives there and in New York City, New York. Dividing her time between Serbia and the U.S. since the late 1990s, she became a U.S. citizen in 2014. Love Canticles was commissioned by the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Andris Nelsons, Music Director, through the generous support of Catherine and Paul Buttenwieser and the New Works Fund established by the Massachusetts Cultural Council, a state agency. Vrebalov received the commission in late 2023, completed the choral score by January 2025, and finished the orchestration by the end of February. World premiere performances: April 26 and 27, 2025, at Symphony Hall, Boston Symphony Orchestra, Andris Nelsons conducting, with the Tanglewood Festival Chorus, James Burton, conductor, and pianists Vytas Baksys and Deborah DeWolf Emery.

The score of Love Canticles calls for mixed chorus (soprano, alto, tenor, bass) with an orchestra based on that of Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms, omitting the violin and viola sections and including two pianos. The ensemble consists of piccolo, 3 flutes, 2 oboes, 4 horns, high trumpet in D, 4 trumpets in C, trombone, bass trombone, tuba, timpani, percussion (vibraphone, suspended cymbal, bass drum), harp, 2 pianos, and strings (cellos and double basses only).

Growing up in Serbia in the former Yugoslavia, Aleksandra Vrebalov received the excellent early musical training that remains a strong foundation for her work as a composer and teacher. She came of age during the tumultuous era of political instability that followed the death of longtime Yugoslav president Josip Broz Tito in 1980, which led to years of regional warfare and eventually the breakup of Yugoslavia into several different sovereign states. Vrebalov attended Novi Sad University and Belgrade University. Seeking broader horizons, she came to the U.S. for the first time in 1995 for further study at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, where she worked with composer Elinor Armer and earned her master’s degree in just a year. The experience of studying and living in San Francisco, historically a greenhouse of artistic experimentation, opened her eyes to a world of artistic freedom that was unknown to her in Serbia.

It was while she was in San Francisco that Vrebalov met the members of the well-known, new music-minded Kronos Quartet, beginning a powerfully collaborative relationship that has continued for the last 30 years. She composed her String Quartet No. 2 for the ensemble in 1997; it was this piece that introduced Vrebalov’s music to the Boston Symphony community when it was performed as part of the 1999 Festival of Contemporary Music at Tanglewood. Vrebalov had returned to the U.S. that year as a Fellow of the BSO’s Tanglewood Music Center, although for several weeks it was unclear whether she would be able to make the journey to the U.S. from Novi Sad. In March 1999, NATO had launched a campaign of bombings in Serbia to force the country to abandon the so-called Kosovo War initiated by the government of Slobodan Milošević. The NATO bombings, which ended on June 10 of that year, resulted in more than 6,000 casualties, among them more than 1,000 dead, and in the destruction of important infrastructure in Serbia, including three of Novi Sad’s major bridges over the Danube.

Vrebalov left that environment to come to the starkly contrasted setting of Tanglewood—idyllic, rural, remote, steeped in music and in its long legacy of dedication to the art form. At Tanglewood she encountered high-level musicians from different backgrounds; her Tanglewood Music Center cohort included composers from Switzerland, Germany, Israel, and the U.S. (but she was the only woman). Following Tanglewood she earned her doctorate at the University of Michigan, working with Evan Chambers and Michael Daugherty. For the past 25 years she has divided her time between New York City and Novi Sad. She returns as a visitor to Tanglewood nearly every summer, and in 2008 the Kronos Quartet performed her “…hold me, neighbor, in this storm…” at Seiji Ozawa Hall.

So far, Vrebalov has written twenty pieces for Kronos, including 2023’s Gold Came from Space; the hour-long Sea Ranch Songs; the Carnegie Hall-commissioned “…hold me, neighbor, in this storm…”; Babylon, Our Own, for Kronos and clarinetist David Krakauer, and Beyond Zero: 1914-1918, created in collaboration with the noted filmmaker Bill Morrison and later released on DVD. She wrote her most recent piece, Cardinal Directions, for Kronos and the Vietnamese đàn tranh player Vanessa Vo (Võ Vân Ánh), who gives the public premiere at the Kronos Festival in San Francisco on April 25, 2025. Cardinal Directions was composed in recognition of the 50th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War; Vrebalov’s own experience growing up in a war-torn region brings a broader human perspective to this prayer for peace.

Vrebalov has taught throughout much of her career and is currently a professor of composition at the University of Novi Sad’s Academy of Arts, but she also composes full-time; she has nearly 100 works to her credit for a dizzying array of ensemble types, including ten orchestra works, music for dance, incidental music for the theater, works for solo instruments and chamber ensembles, and music for traditional and non-Western instruments including the Japanese koto and shakuhachi as well as pieces for Chinese instruments, composed following a residency in China. She has also created experimental pieces with graphic scores and sound installations. Visual art is part of her expressive means, either as standalone works or as a way of representing aspects of a musical work in progress (see image above). She has written three operas—most recently the one-act The Knock, produced for video by Glimmerglass Opera and for the stage by Cincinnati Opera. Her evening-length opera Mileva, based Vida Ognjenović’s play about Albert Einstein’s first wife, was commissioned by the Serbian National Theater for its 150th anniversary and was staged in Novi Sad and Belgrade in November 2011.

All of Vrebalov’s works, even those for ostensibly conventional means, are deeply informed by the circumstances and people for whom they are written. In addition to the Kronos Quartet and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, commissions and awards have come from such organizations and ensembles as Carnegie Hall, Serbian National Theatre, English National Ballet, Festival Ballet Providence, Beijing’s Forbidden City Orchestra, the Fromm Foundation, American Academy of Arts and Letters, and many others. She has worked with the Flying Carpet Children Festival on the Syrian-Turkish border to bring the power of music-making to young refugees of war. In 2024, she was honored with membership in the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, a major recognition of her status as one of her country’s most important cultural thinkers. (In recent months, she has used her status to lend her support to the ongoing, widespread protests against governmental corruption in Serbia.) Also in 2024, she received one of the music world’s most prestigious prizes, the Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition, for her Missa Supratext, written for the Kronos Quartet and the San Francisco Girls Chorus in 2018.

Missa Supratext is, as she puts it, “a mass beyond language and anthropocentrism…unrelated to any religion. The text is made up, with no meaning; it is rather a vehicle for voice, that is a vehicle of soul, to express emotion beyond verbal narratives.” By employing vocal sounds without semantic basis, Vrebalov seeks to remove the restrictions that linguistic meaning imposes and thereby to open the piece to infinite nuances of interpretation.

This openness to possibility is a concept that Vrebalov has explored increasingly throughout her music. Her work, broadly stated, seeks to identify and resonate with a greater sense of universal or cosmic order, to reflect an idea of the interconnectedness of all things. Several of her works are explicit expressions of this holistic philosophy. Among these are her Antennae, composed for the Cleveland Museum of Arts and taking inspiration from the museum’s spaces and the artifacts in its Byzantine gallery. In Antennae Vrebalov collaborated directly with monks of the Kovilj Monastery near Novi Sad, with whom she has cultivated friendships over many years. Founded in the 13th century, the order continues and teaches the ancient practice of Byzantine chant, which is considered a medium for access to another plane of experience.

The idea of a work of art as a receptor and amplifier of the cosmos is strongly present in Love Canticles, which is at the same time a very personal work for the composer. She was cognizant of composing for an orchestra she has heard countless times at Tanglewood and for a conductor, in Andris Nelsons, with a sense of the flexibility of musical time that’s deeply in sympathy with her own. While the request from the Boston Symphony Orchestra was for a work setting Biblical psalms, it was her decision to set in the prevalent language of her second home, and to use the archaic but familiar King James texts, which remove them ever so slightly from the everyday. Vrebalov heeded the counsel of one of her friends from the monastery, now Jerotej, Bishop of Šabac, of the Serbian Orthodox Church, who suggested Psalms 103 and 104, hymns of praise attributed to King David, as a way of acknowledging the good fortune of her own life. The textually similar psalms are blended together in Vrebalov’s setting.

The links between Love Canticles and Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms go beyond the BSO’s stipulation that she create psalm settings and use Stravinsky’s unusual orchestration. In comments to Andris Nelsons about her piece, Vrebalov quotes a passage from Stravinsky’s Poetics of Music: “[T]he unity of the work has a resonance all its own. Its echo, caught by our soul, sounds nearer and nearer. Thus the consummated work spreads abroad and finally flows back to its source…. And that is how music comes to reveal itself as a form of communion with our fellow man and with the Supreme Being.” Stravinsky was famously contradictory in speaking of his music; at times he emphasized the inherent objectivity of musical sound, an aspect he pursued especially in his “neoclassical” period, of which Symphony of Psalms is an exemplar. On the other hand, around the same time he wrote Symphony of Psalms, he also wrote hymns in Church Slavonic; in the 1940s he wrote a Latin Mass he considered suitable for liturgical use. Although he used archaic languages (as he had for explicitly objectifying purpose in the opera Oedipus rex), the origin of his sacred texts, taken with other comments including the above quotation, reveals Stravinsky as being intensely aware of the dimensionality of his music, which clearly echoes in Aleksandra Vrebalov’s own philosophy.

Always ambivalent about genre and in particular that of the symphony, Stravinsky called Symphony of Psalms a “symphonization” of the choral settings. In a parallel way, Love Canticles can be thought of as a choral piece with orchestra rather than a work for orchestra with chorus. Vrebalov establishes this choral core by beginning with voices alone and ending with a sparsely accompanied, chantlike passage. But she also treats the voices as instruments, in wordless textures that connect them to the orchestral sound. These passages are aspects of freedom, variation, and dynamic possibility within what is otherwise a rigorous formal architecture.

The blend of freedom and creativity afforded to individual musicians on one level and rigor in the overall structure is characteristic of Vrebalov’s work. In Love Canticles, that architecture is articulated at the highest level through centers of tonality. Beginning and ending on C, the piece traverses tonal centers of G, E, and B-flat. To open the piece, the bass voices establish a drone-like C that blossoms in the choir’s first harmony: “Bless the Lord, oh my soul.” As if picking up the vibrations of that idea, strings and pianos enter with a texture resembling overlapping lines of morse code, and the sound expands in waves with instruments joining in animatedly.

Vrebalov highlights the individual artistry and virtuosity of the BSO’s members through solo passages, both short and long, for virtually every player, from bass trombone and tuba at the lowest end of the spectrum to piccolo at the top. In capturing the overall and local expression of the psalms, she occasionally employs madrigal-like word-painting, projecting the text into the music, as in the passage “He remembers that we are dust,” where the texture become pointillistic and fragmented. In keeping with the nature of the psalms as both public and private in nature, she treats the chorus at times as a collective and at times as a group of individuals, some of whom occasionally stray exuberantly from the flock.

The final “Hallelujah,” meaning “Praise the Lord,” encapsulates in a single word the poeticized praise of the foregoing psalms. Musically, the phrase works as both coda and cadenza: Vrebalov carefully notated the rhythms to suggest the organic fluidity of the Byzantine chant that has been such a profound influence on her work. The phrase re-centers both the listener and the chorus after the work’s wide-ranging journey, while the subtle atmosphere of the orchestra hints at the many further layers of experience that lie just outside our grasp.

Robert Kirzinger

Composer and writer Robert Kirzinger is the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s Director of Program Publications.