Being fascinated with musical space-time: Piano works by Branka Popović (Solitude: Self reflections, Within a dense molecular cloud and From Rayleigh to Mie)

Abstract

The piano works by Branka Popović (1977) appear as a unique and independent group in her oeuvre, as well as in the context of Serbian music of the current century. The question of the relation between the composer and musical space-time, which can be experienced directly, during the act of listening and indirectly, during the analysis of the piece of music, emerges as an essential point for understanding and interpreting Branka Popović's piano works. Under the assumption that this relationship is in the realm of unconsciousness and intuition, my goal in this article is to discover the hidden places that show how the musical space-time manifests, in this case, in the piano writing of Branka Popović. To achieve that, I will use an interpretative musical analysis, in which I will point out the specific compositional technique that Branka Popović employs and by which she 'regulates' different musical dimensions and, more precisely, musical components and their elements (specifically rhythm, timbre or tone color, harmony, motivic/thematic structuring, and dynamics) in the act of shaping the musical space-time.