Dear friends and colleagues,

Happy New Year!

One of the most beautiful things of 2025 was our encounters at concerts and rehearsals — across more than a dozen countries and two dozen cities where I worked this year. In total, there were over 100 performances of 24 different works at Carnegie Hall, Musikverein Wien, Kölner Philharmonie, Boston Symphony Hall, SFJAZZ Center, and other wonderful venues.

I wrote three works in 2025 — Four Faces, Four Wings (Gulbenkian Foundation, Casa da Música Porto, and Philharmonie de Paris), Love Canticles (Boston Symphony Orchestra), and Cardinal Directions (Van Anh Vo and Kronos Quartet, with support from the David Harrington Research Fund).

The Knock, my opera with a libretto by Deborah Brevoort, also found its way home in 2025. While composing the opera in Novi Sad, I imagined Colorado Springs — the faces, the sky, the Rockies rising at 6,000 feet — and Fort Carson, where the story unfolds. Returning to this community to share the work was deeply moving, not least because nearly everyone I spoke with had lived some part of its reality or carried it through someone close to them. The piece traces the long arc of war’s aftermath across generations and geographies, from my own family history to the echoes of the 1999 bombing of Serbia, as a reminder of how intertwined these stories are, and how essential it is to give musical voice to children and families who grieve mostly unseen.

Among the special moments was the ECHO Rising Stars Tour with the MAAT Saxophone Quartet across Europe, and the New York performance of Gold Came From Space with Kronos Quartet.

The year also included sharing my work with composition students at the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, New York University (Composers Forum with Julia Wolfe), and the San Francisco Conservatory of Music (Composition Seminar with David Garner). I gave my introductory lecture as a newly elected member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts titled Sound as a Space of Memory and Healing: Compositional Approaches in Works Addressing Contemporary and Historical Political Turmoil.

Critical reception included reviews in The New York Times and The Boston Globe, as well as a feature in San Francisco Classical Voice. I was honored to receive the Darinka Matić Marović Award at the KotorArt Festival in Montenegro for continuous contribution to the contemporary music scene throughout the region of ex-Yugoslavia, as well as the ASCAP PLUS Award for 2025.

Xenia and the Bishop, for wind quintet and narrator, commissioned by the Fromm Foundation and performed by New York’s Sylvan Winds with Mary Beth Peil, was released by Albany Records on December 5 on Resonant Worlds. It is a musical fairy-tale about a passionate chess player — I think children around you would enjoy it!

Looking ahead to 2026, the next deadline is approaching fast — a new work for my old, dear collaborators, the Brooklyn Youth Chorus, for the group’s 35th anniversary. I continue teaching at a composition studio at the Academy of Arts in Novi Sad and contribute to the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts through a project on the global presence of Serbian concert music in the first quarter of the 21st century (if you feel like contributing, do get in touch!).

In addition to Novi Sad and New York where you’ll be seeing me a lot, I hope we cross paths at the upcoming performances of Four Faces, Four Wings at the Philharmonie de Paris, the Elbphilharmonie, in Lisbon, Barcelona, or in Iceland with the MAAT Saxophone Quartet.

Thank you to all of you who performed, commissioned, and presented my work. I look forward to more of our exchange, inspiration, and music making, and I wish you health and joy in the New Year!

Cheers,

Aleksandra

aleksandravrebalov.com