Parenting the piano: Miroslav Miša Savić's 'St. Lazarus Waltz'

Abstract

This article deals with a work by a contemporary Serbian composer Miroslav Miša Savić (b. 1954): St. Lazarus Waltz for one or two grand pianos, with or without children's toy pianos. Since St. Lazarus is a children's holiday, the composer's idea was to depict children by toy pianos, while the grand pianos are 'parents'. The waltz exists in several versions: from the first one, where the children pianos are quite small and their musical parts very restricted, to the version for two 'adult' pianos, which describes the moment in life when children have grown up and left their parental home. Aside from exploring these musical 'family ties', Savić implements a simple yet ingenious constructive principle in all versions of this waltz. The structure of the piece is based on the exploitation of the system of equal temperament and on the Fibonacci row, and this frame is filled with several layers of musical references, including: Johann Sebastian Bach and other composers who wrote 'well-tempered' piano music; repetitive/processual minimalism, a style that Savić and his peers brought into Serbian music, but have since evolved in different directions; the Serbian tradition of romantic salon piano pieces; finally, the Orthodox tradition, but referenced in a way very different from the 'NEO-Orthodox' trend that has been present in Serbian art music since the late 1980s.