At the beginning of the year, Sanja and I attended the Be Your Own Manager (BYOM) course for musicians, which was online and was organized by a former intendant for the Vienna Concert Hall (Konzerthaus). In April and May, BYOM alumni organized the largest online Nextus Festival of classical and neoclassical music, where Sanja and I performed independently. The festival lasted 4 full weekends and 34 musicians from all over the world performed, (additionally, we had great speakers every weekend, who would end the festival with a great talk about music, creativity, today’s leadership, etc). Listening to Sanja with her colleague on a guitar, her oboe made me cry (they performed various world classics, including Isidora Žebeljan). Sanja’s performance moved me to tears because her playing was sincere and full of emotion. Music brought us closer, created friendship, and although we never saw each other outside the online world, the idea was born to send her my two compositions, “Sadness” and “Rain Drops”, so she could hear them and feel if these compositions “resonate” with her. She listened to them carefully and wrote beautiful oboe arrangements for each, and played those parts. I felt she understood my emotions and built on them. The compositions are of a melancholic character and are inspired by sad life events. “Sadness” is dedicated to everyone who felt the health problems of their loved ones and felt helpless. “Rain Drops” can be described as drops of sadness in the world of a woman who does not find support from her loved ones in creative aspirations…
Special thanks to Davor Rocco, who craftly mixed my piano and Sanja’s oboe and amazingly mastered these two beautiful songs.