It has been said that childhood memories are the threads of our souls. Those early memories stay with us, weaving us into the adults we become.
The threads of childhood experience and cultural identity will be woven into a tapestry of sound in a concert of the Worthington Chamber Orchestra and the New World Singers of the Columbus Children’s Choir Sunday, May 5 at 5 p.m. in Worthington United Methodist Church. Worthington Chamber Orchestra Artistic and Music Director Antoine Clark will conduct the world premiere of Columbus-based Serbian-American composer Vera Stanojevic’s Echoes from Childhood, along with orchestral works by the 20th-century Yugoslavian-born Serbian composer Ljubica Maric and Czech composers Dvorak and Smetana.
The concert marks the final performance in the orchestra’s 2023-24 Masterworks series. The series’ three concerts are united under the theme ‘Woven Stories’ and feature musical works in which composers tell the stories of their cultural identities. The orchestra’s first two Masterworks concerts featured Asian and African American composers, respectively. The May 5 concert features works in the tradition of folk-inspired classical music from central and eastern Europe.
Commissioned jointly by the Worthington Chamber Orchestra and the Columbus Children’s Choir, Stanojevic’s Echoes from Childhood continues that tradition to the present day.
“This co-commission with Columbus Children’s Choir was done to convey how folk music can influence modern composers today, to bring attention to historical eras, geographical locations and the composers’ life experience and how they intertwine to tell a story,” Clark said.
The story Stanojevic tells in Echoes from Childhood is one of many strands representing the innocence of youth, dislocation, violence and the hope for a better future. Stanojevic grew up in her native Yugoslavia, leaving the country at age 18 to complete graduate and postgraduate studies at the Tchaikovsky Conservatory in Moscow.
Shortly after Stanojevic moved to the United States in 1991, a decade of civil wars splintered Yugoslavia into six independent Balkan nations. Today, the country where Stanojevic spent her childhood no longer exists. So to convey something of her heritage in music, Stanojevic found she had to reach back to her years of childhood in her native land.
“I immediately started thinking about the music of that period, songs connected to early childhood or young children,” Stanojevic said.
The first movement of Echoes from Childhood is inspired by the children’s singing games of Stanojevic’s youth. The movement’s text, which she wrote, begins in a playful patter of Serbo-Croatian and continues in nursery-rhyme English.
“The (words) don’t have much meaning, but they’re funny. They sound good rhythmically, but they’re hard because this is a very different language. So I used the first line of text from the children’s song, then I continued in English, whatever came to my mind. If those kids in Yugoslavia were to speak English, this is how they would speak it,” Stanojevic said.
The second movement of Echoes from Childhood is dedicated to children the world over who have died in wars and school shootings. Amid the alarming rise of school shootings in the U.S., the 2023 school shooting in Belgrade, Serbia, brought the problem home to Stanojevic in a new way.
“There are these cross-world tragedies that are happening to children. We can’t change the tragedy in children’s lives, we cannot maybe heal all the illnesses, but I think we can protect (children) from wars and shootings,” Stanojevic said.
In the second movement, the children in the choir sing the first names of children who have died violently and all too young. The work returns to a lively Serbian-inspired children’s counting song in its third and final movement.
“Not only musically do you want something that’s uplifting, but I also I wanted to speak about the strength of children, their ability to recover and to again go back to good lives and happy lives – with scars, but moving on,” Stanojevic said.
Also on the program are Yugoslavian-born Ljubica Maric’s Music for Orchestra (1932), a work in a modern musical language rooted in Serbian folk music, and two Czech favorites – Smetana’s The Moldau (Vltava) and Dvorak’s Symphony No. 9 “From the New World.”
In addition to the musical offerings, the May 5 concert will also feature the presentation of a loom-woven textile created on commission by Columbus weaver Scott Hanratty, who also serves as the Worthington Chamber Orchestra’s principal bassoonist. Hanratty’s blanket weaves together central and eastern European and American cultural identities by way of a Balkan-inspired pattern and the hues of natural linen and dark indigo-dyed wool traditional to American weaving.
Hanratty took the title of his woven work, Echoes, from Stanojevic’s Echoes from Childhood. In turn, Stanojevic says composing the work gave her a chance to weave her life in the United States and her early life in the former Yugoslavia into a story with a universal message.
“Immigrants live two lives, they feel always they have two lives,” Stanojevic said. “And for me, anytime I can put those two lives together is a special moment.”
The Worthington Chamber Orchestra and the Columbus Children’s Choir will give the world premiere of Vera Stanojevic’s Echoes from Childhood Sunday, May 5 at 5 p.m. in Worthington United Methodist Church.
Disclosure: Jennifer Hambrick serves on the boards of the Worthington Chamber Orchestra and the Columbus Children’s Choir.
