The Serbian composer Isidora Žebeljan (1967–2020) established a profound international presence and affirmation through an opus that includes five operas and numerous orchestral and chamber works commissioned by leading international opera productions, festivals, and ensembles. In her music, she boldly cruised between diverse kinds of music, erecting bridges across vast expanses to link different media, styles, historical epochs, cultures, and “geopoetic excavations” (Čičovački 2023). A defining stylistic feature of her music is polystylism grounded in heterogeneous material, through which she connects the spiritual and expressive dimensions of Serbian and broader Balkan folkloric heritage with contemporary compositional techniques. She sought to reanimate the inherent musical potential of the folk idiom, integrating it into her own distinct musical language.

Žebeljan's folkloric memory served as a catalyst for a unique methodology. In the composer's own words, her structural approach is based on the sequencing of scenes, and on film as a conceptual model. According to Žebeljan, these are not scenes in the sense of static scenography or mere decorative tableaux; rather, they are scenes defined by “events dynamically unfolded in time, animated in a cinematic manner” (Žebeljan 2021). These musical events possess narrative and psychological dimensions, serving—as the composer noted—to evoke a sensory experience of specific phenomena, while simultaneously corresponding to the structural logic of symphonic development. In orchestral works such as Escenas Picaras (1992), The Horses of Saint Mark, Illumination for Orchestra (2004), Minstrel's Dance (2005), the fundamental approach to formal construction is based on images (scenes), while the composer describes her Song of a Traveller in the Night (2003) as “a journey through different landscapes.”

Through selected examples of Žebeljan's orchestral works, this study aims to explore the specific traits of her polystylism and demonstrates that the concept of journey functions as a formal–poetic nucleus, revealing journey not only as a metaphorical idea but as a structural and poetic principle embedded in the very core of her orchestral thinking.

References:

Čičovački, Borislav: “The Oeuvre of Isidora Žebeljan. A Survey, Classification, Specificities, and Significance”, New Sound, No. 61, 2023, pp. 139–171.

Premate, Zorica (Ed.). Novi zvučni prostori [New Sound Spaces]. Beograd: JMU Radio-televizija Srbije, 2019.

Schmelz, Peter: Sonic Overload: Alfred Schnittke, Valentin Silvestrov, and Polystylism in the Late USSR. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021.

Žebeljan, Isidora: Dok slušamo muziku, sadašnjost je večna [While Listening to Music, the Present is Eternal]. Novi Sad: Akademska knjiga, 2021.