Dernek for two Harpsichords or Pianos, Percussion and Strings

Legal scholar and composer Ivo Josipović (1957) took his bachelor’s and doctorate in law at the Faculty of Law in the University of Zagreb. He also took a degree in composition at the Music Academy in Zagreb, having been taught by Stanko Horvat. He also did further law studies at distinguished institutions and universities abroad. In 2003 he was elected a member of the Croatian parliament, and from 2010 to 2015 he held the office of President of the Republic of Croatia. His composing oeuvre, consisting of fifty or so works, encompasses orchestral, concertante, vocal, vocal and instrumental, chamber and solo works. „(...) In truth, I did not finish Dernek until a few months later, at the beginning of 1988. Because Gaudeamus Chamber Orchestra particularly concentrated on the Baroque repertoire, I had been thinking of how to combine this penchant of the orchestra with the music that I had composed up to that date. I had already moved at that time from the style largely associated with what was called the Polish School towards the postmodern, as the reviewers wrote about my compositions at the time. Then I adopted a form distantly related to the concerto grosso, that typical form of the Baroque. To this I added themes from Croatian folk music, articulated in the manner of the grotesque, and on top of it all elements of contemporary sound. The effect of the grotesque, and the neo-Baroque motorics, were supported by the percussion. Criticism judged a composition combining classical form with elements of the contemporary and the traditional a typical composition of postmodernism, whatever that meant to the various musical aesthetes. Naturally, I knew that it was not easy to find two harpsichords, and, as ambitious composer who trusted that there would be many performances, I arranged the texture in such a way that a performance with two pianos would also be possible. This later proved to be a wise choice and helped Dernek to go through many performances in ensembles from the chamber to the large string section of a symphony orchestra. The actual name of the composition, it seems to me, images its musical content well. The word dernek is a Turkish loan word, which means village fair, marketplace, rural celebration. The derivation, dernečiti, to dernek, means to have a wild, somewhat rough revel, in modern terms we might say a binge.“ (Ivo Josipović)