The SONEMUS Ensemble hosts a festival for contemporary classical music held from April 7th to April 9th 2017 in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. As the ONLY contemporary music ensemble in Bosnia and Herzegovina, our mission is to perform, promote and educate in the field of contemporary music.
Our wish is to present the biggest musical achievements of the 20th and 21st century to the Bosnian-Herzegovinian audience, where contemporary music still has a status of an almost exotic and unknown genre of classical music. We offer all of our concerts and lectures with no admission.
Part of our cultural code in the field of contemporary artistic music, is the creativity of one of the most important composers of the 20th century, György Ligeti. At this year’s festival the central work that will be performed by Ensemble SONEMUS (www.sonemus.com) is his Chamber Concerto for thirteen instrumentalists.
Hungarian Jewish composer György Ligeti was born in 1923 at Diciosânmărtin (which was renamed Târnăveni in 1941), in the Romanian region of Transylvania. In 1944, Ligeti’s education was interrupted when he was sent to a forced labor brigade by the Horthy regime. His brother, age 16, was deported to the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp and both of his parents were sent to Auschwitz. His mother was the only other survivor of his immediate family.
The suffering, injustice, emotional shocks that the young Ligeti experienced, had significantly influenced on his diverse musical aesthetic and wide opus of creativity. Music is an expression of unspeakable, resistance, response of his being to the experienced trauma, which together formed a new artistic world – recovered from the flame, and in the history of music, recorded as one of the most referent points for the beginning of the new music theories.
In a country recently torn by war it is absolutely imperative to dig deep into the emotions of people to show them that there is joy, love and life inside us all. Music is one of the few vehicles which can do this. We have a moral obligation to use the cultural and artistic roots of the nation and maybe, during our concerts, even for one hour or for one minute the audience will forget about their everyday problems.
The context of Ligeti’s creativity, led by strength and courage, represents a bright point of the SONEMUS Fest, which 2o years after the war also represents the artistic world recovered from the flames.
To make this project and happen and give the country’s first performance of György Ligeti’s crucial work, we still need 1500 $ to cover the rental costs of the performance material (sheet music for the Chamber Concerto) and the concert costs (concert hall rental, lights, equipment such as microphones and stands).
We have already raised the majority of our funds from numerous charities and foundations around Europe but we need more in order to put the actual concerts on. With your help it can become a very real reality of one place becoming the center stage for world musicians coming together to celebrate the music of György Ligeti.
We hope that you will understand the importance of this event and support us to make it happen. Even without a donation, you can still contribute and help us achieve our goal: SHARE our campaign, sing and write about it! Spread the word about SONEMUS!
