Voices of earthmen (1995) by Vladan Radovanovic: A review

Abstract

This paper discusses the compositional technique and the poetic level of the composition Glasovi Zemljana (Voices of Earthmen) composed by Vladan Radovanovic in 1995. The work is based on the composer?s own musical principle, which he called hyperpoliphony, established in his early work Polyphony No. 9, and applied in his entire musical opus to date. The composition contains three movements, although the disposition of each section implies integration at a higher level of its structure, enabling us to interpret this work as an organic, textually unified three-part whole. Even though so-called hyperpolyphony creates and pervades the whole composition, this music is not the outcome of some rigid system. It breathes and it has its own ?warm? and even ?confessing? sections, especially in the unexpected instrumental and vocal ?solo-episodes?. Although this work was composed in an age of musical postmodernism, and shows a very strong imprint of musical expressionism, its atonality and very specific modernist musical technique define it as a modernist work, which places it in the huge trajectory of musical modernism of the second half of the twentieth century.