Biography

Fascinated with the idea of music as composed time and the sort of possibilities for creating dramatic rituals and temporal geographies such an understanding affords, Eli is a composer and pianist currently based in Melbourne. His works have been played by Halfsound Duo, Nick Slaney, Ensemble Con Fuoco, Plexus and the Shanghai Philharmonic Orchestra, and he has also performed them himself at institutions such as ACCA, the University of Melbourne and the Cvijeta Zuzorić Arts Pavilion in Belgrade, Serbia. Among other highlights, Eli was featured as a composer/improviser in the 60×60 program at the 2014 conference of the Australasian Computer Music Association, in several editions of the new music playlist Making Waves and was selected to participate in the 2017 Hearing China festival. Most recently in 2018, Eli’s article “Composing the Other Mulan: Eli Simic-Prosic” about the composition of his work Festivities of Fragment was published on http://www.CutCommon.com and a dramatic monologue he wrote was premiered by Four Letter Word theatre in their production Everything is Fine. Completing his BMus from the University of Melbourne in mid-2015, Eli is currently studying with Brenton Broadstock for his Honours degree and has in the past studied with Kevin March, Linda Kouvaras, Katy Abbott, Julian Yu and Elliott Gyger.

Composer website:  https://soundcloud.com/eli-simic-prosic

Featured Works

Sound Sculpture No. 1, for piano.

This piece was written as an attempt to reconcile the idea of sound as both a physical, material phenomenon and as something which can be moulded willfully by composers, performers and listeners into the communal event infused with meaning we know as music. In this sense I have conceived the piece as a sculpture (r)evolving through time as it moves between phases of suspension and agitation, mixing indeterminate elements with fixed points of reference as if we were viewing the morphing musical object from different angles within the unifying resonant space of the musical performance.

Featured in Playlist 2 – Other-worldly Waves (28/02/2015)

Stratus Rising, for piano.

The inspiration for Stratus Rising came to me in early 2010 when my family and I stayed at a friend’s house in the Victorian alpine town of Warburton. The house sits on the slope of a big crescent hill, and one early morning I walked out onto the porch and witnessed something truly sublime: the green hill was covered in wispy strands of white clouds slowly climbing their way up the slope to return back to the sky. Moments after seeing this magical sight I sat at my friend’s piano and began writing this composition, though it was not until April 2011 that I finished the work. What I have tried to create here is a piece of music which embodies the dynamic nature of this vision and that region, one which is at times sublimely peaceful against the backdrop of its still, low-lying clouds, and at others equally tumultuous when these very same clouds turn into powerful storms.

Featured in Solo Waves – April 2016 (1/04/2016).

I/O, for Diskclavier and effects.

I/O explores multiple approaches to the sounds possible on the piano via electronic manipulation. Nothing is external; every element of the work originates in the analogue sounds made on the disklavier, a sort of modern, digitally-enabled version of the player piano.

Featured in Keyboard Waves November 2016

Festivities Of Fragment, for Orchestra.

The work is an ecstatic and fervent exploration of the aria “Brother Liu is Prejudiced Against Women” from the Yu Opera ‘Hua Mulan’. Through extension and fragmentation, the aria becomes a musical frame upon which my music seeks out interaction between the soloist as individual and the orchestra as mass. What begins in media res with a monolithic orchestral eruption based on an isolated cadential motive from the aria gradually crystallises into a joyous dance between several living “fragments”: the pipa, a string quartet drawn from within the orchestra, the twinkling quintet of the harp and the four percussionists, and ultimately the orchestra itself. The music journeys through the prism of the entire aria from beginning to end, living fragments dispersed within the musical fragments, all mutually constituting one another towards a climactic, scintillating and harmonious union.

Featured in Orchestral Waves (November 2018)