Joana Gama & Ivan Vukosavljevic: a mind in the heart
TRPTK

Despite describing the piano in liner notes as a “non-malleable instrument” (something specialists in prepared techniques would presumably challenge) and “an instrument [he's] been avoiding throughout [his] compositional career,” Ivan Vukosavljevic, a Serbian composer based in The Hague, has nevertheless created a mind in the heart, a solo piano collection produced in collaboration with Portuguese pianist Joana Gama. She's issued recordings on a number of labels, including Room40 and Pianola, and presented music by Satie and, on Travels in My Homeland: Portuguese Piano Music (Grand Piano, 2019), composers from her homeland.

Inspirations came from three primary sources for a mind in the heart, the music from the composer's Serbian homeland (and in particular sacred chants of the Orthodox Church), the writings of Meister Eckhart, and the daughter born to him and his wife Lise, Hannah Morrison Vukosavljevic. Recorded at Westvestkerk, Schiedam in September 2025, a mind in the heart comprises eight movements and exemplifies a distinctive character that directly evokes the music of his home country.

While melody isn't absent, it's but part of the musical fabric when the movements manifest a chant-like quality intensified by the subliminal presence of drones. As he astutely describes it, a mind in the heart merges the horizontal dimension of melody and drone with the vertical dimension of the harmonic keyboard instrument. Classical and spiritual elements blend in the material, which, in being such a personal expression, is imbued with a warm familial glow. While it's not a programmatic work, it does advance methodically towards its culmination, the birth of his daughter.

Vukosavljevic himself acknowledges the powerful influence of Balkans-derived Orthodox chant on his creative psyche, even if its manifests itself unconsciously in his music as unbounded development and hypnotic melody. He highlights the creation of the album's third movement, “ninia sili,” as a breakthrough in capturing his attempt at distilling the sacred into musical form through the reinterpretation of a fifteenth-century hymn from the Serbian Orthodox tradition.

The music's chant-like quality permeates the titular opening movement when chords are spaciously distributed and meditative silences separate them. Though not explicitly articulated, the reverberation of a drone is palpably felt as an undercurrent throughout the ten-minute performance. Tension incrementally builds as the movement progresses and the chords ascend. The subtly intoxicating effect of the first part carries over into the rhythmically lulling “a citadel,” which elaborates on the initial movement's design by augmenting chords with phrases that chime and flutter. Against a dizzying backdrop of animated clusters, a haunting melody wends its way through “ninia sili”; slightly calmer, the incandescent “a virgin” lilts dreamily with dramatic rising-and-falling patterns and key modulations tailor-made to induce entrancement. The haunting character of the music persists through the remaining movements, including the penultimate “for Nata,” before the gentle lyricism of “a child” guides the release to a satisfying resolution. In its chords-based design, it echoes the format of the opening movement too.

April 2026