Marijana Janevska
Composer · Performer
Her artistic practice is inherently somatic, living within the breath, posture, and physical resistance of the performer, and employing the voice as a conduit for both spoken language and sonic expression.
Marijana Janevska (born in 1990 in Skopje, Macedonia) is a composer, violinist, vocalist, and performer whose artistic practice brings together instrumental music, voice, text, electronics, physical movement, and theatrical elements.
She completed her master’s degree in composition (2020) and the advanced postgraduate Solo Class programme (2024) at the University of Music, Drama and Media Hannover, studying under Ming Tsao, Gordon Williamson, Aaron Cassidy, and Joachim Heintz.
Janevska’s work explores the different ways in which text, voice, expression, and performance can generate and transform musical material. A central aspect of her artistic practice is the relationship between sound and the performing body. Her works often move between instrumental composition, vocal performance, electroacoustic music, installation, and music theatre, questioning conventional distinctions between composer, performer, instrument, and audience.
As both a creator and an active performer of contemporary experimental music, her physical experience on stage directly feeds her compositional thinking. Physical movement, posture, and effort are not used as theatrical staging, but as foundational musical gestures, while spoken, whispered, and fragmented words function simultaneously as rhythmic structures, sound sources, and carriers of meaning. Her interdisciplinary works examine identity, communication, social conditioning, intimacy, alienation, and memory within contemporary society, often through a deep exploration of the live interaction between the human voice, the violin, objects, and live electronics.
Janevska's music has been presented across leading international platforms for contemporary music and media arts, including ZKM Next Generation (Karlsruhe), Musik21 Festival, Tage für neue Musik (Zürich), Music Biennale, TRAIECT Festival, International Csound Conference, TIEM Festival (Tehran), SONEMUS Festival, and Klangbrücken Festival. Her compositions have taken shape through collaborations with leading interpretive ensembles spanning solo, chamber, and interdisciplinary formats, including the Mivos Quartet, Ensemble Ascolta, Ensemble Mosaik, Ensemble Adapter, PRE-ART, Concerto Ispirato, Comet Trio, and Megaphon Ensemble.
Her work has been recognized with numerous distinctions, including the Oldenburg Composition Prize for Contemporary Music from the City of Oldenburg (2024), First Prize at the 9th Pre-Art Competition for Young Composers in Zürich, and the Klaus Huber Composition Prize for Electronic Music in Hannover. She has also held an artist residency at Künstlerhof Schreyahn, and received composition scholarships from the Lower Saxony Ministry of Science and Culture and the German Music Council, alongside a Neustart Scholarship from the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation.
Selected Works
Centripetal
for Flute, Harp and Viola
Commissioned by the Göttingen Evenings of Contemporary Music e.V. with support from Musik 21 Niedersachsen, the Lower Saxony Foundation, the Göttingen Cultural Foundation and NDR Music Funding in Lower Saxony.
Silence(d)
for female voice and electronics
How does the silence of the silenced voice sound — especially the female voice? This silence is not relaxing, but loud. The piece confronts the resistance and difficulty inherent in speech and expression.
A room of her own
for performer, video, light, transducers and percussive instruments
What is absent, and what is present? What is real, and what is virtual? What is past, and what is present? What is moving, and what is static? A room of her own inhabits these contrasts, drawing on Virginia Woolf's meditation on the female voice — imaginatively dominant, practically silenced — to explore the layered resistance of speech, communication, and the struggle to be heard, or seen
Marijana Janevska served as a jury member for the Phantomnesis project, Cambiata Arts' international call for contemporary music, experimental composition, and heritage-rooted music, seeking works that explore the forgotten, the near forgotten, and the reimagined — pieces that bring neglected musical systems, regional practices, extinct gestures, or overlooked aesthetic pathways into today's listening. Her expertise in voice, electronics, and somatic performance brought a highly specialized curatorial perspective to the evaluation process.