Žiga Stanič, born 1973, in Ljubljana, is a Slovenian composer, pianist, music producer, and educator. Since 2002, he has been the music producer of the RTV Slovenia Symphony Orchestra. Stanič graduated from the Ljubljana Academy of Music in 1997 with a degree in piano performance in the class of Andrej Jarc, and in 1998 with a degree in composition under the mentorship of Marijan Gabrijelčič. He also studied conducting with Anton Nanut, and he received his doctorate from the Department of Composition and Music Theory in 2007. His theoretical and pedagogical work in the last decade has been marked by co-authorship of the first Slovenian high school e-textbook for music, reviews of translations of three books about Richard Wagner, articles and a seminar on musical synesthesia, public lectures on music production and the systematic arrangement of the musical legacy of composer Marijan Gabrijelčič.
Stanič’s oeuvre comprises more than two hundred compositions and is marked by a variety of genres and compositional approaches. In addition to a series of works for piano – in which he has recently been experimenting with the possibilities of preparing the instrument – and lieder, he also composes chamber works for various ensembles. Of particular note from the last decade are Wind Quintet No. 3, String Quartet No. 3, Sonata for Solo Violin and especially Pomladna suita (Spring Suite) for violin and piano, an extensive work that the composer recorded in 2016 with international violin virtuoso Stefan Milenković. Stanič also dedicates part of his oeuvre to young musicians. Thus, he recorded the musical fairy tale for piano Tisoč in ena nota (A Thousand and One Notes) with sixty-two interconnected sound stories and dedicated it to his own children. In his only stage work, Plešasta pevka (The Bald Soprano, 2013), an anti-opera based on Ionesco’s eponymous (anti)drama, the composer created a negative of opera music in terms of performance, the relationship between text and music, and the dramaturgy. The classical role of the instrumentalists and singers is reversed, as the wind and brass performers become the protagonists, while the choir finds itself in the role of the orchestra. The composer continues to compose for singers, with an emphasis on the creative use of various extended vocal techniques. Of particular note in recent years is Stanič’s collaboration with Ljuben Dimkaroski (1952–2016), in which he created several works that include the tidldibab (Razpoke časa, Baba, Črna luknja). His research and detailed description of the ancient musical instrument with Dimkaroski was expanded into a collaboration with versatile musician Boštjan Gombač, who performed the composition Baba for tidldibab and orchestra, a project of the European Association of Orchestras, eleven times in various European countries. In 2018, Stanič received an international composer’s award in the Netherlands for the symphonic composition Izlet v živalski vrt (A Trip to the Zoo). As a pianist, he performs his Piano concerto No. 2 in 2025.
The music of Žiga Stanič constantly and with a special passion turns outwards. On the one hand, it is music that reflects a curious, communicatively open artist, while, on the other hand, it joins a historical continuum, a heterogeneous tradition. This is evident in the use of madrigalisms, tone painting and rhetorical figures, as well as in various solutions related to programme music, all the way to the practices of the twentieth century, which bridged the gap between increasingly complex inner musical form and the meaning of the experience of music, whether the composers resorted to folklorism or the sonorous sensuality of modern sound. Stanič explores many interests in music. In his works and their modern sonority, he addresses the experience of living and listening in the modern world, the sonority of nature and human society, familiar situations and gestures, folk songs, and ancient musical formulas and archetypes. At the same time, the composer joins the rich tradition of setting texts to music, focusing on various layers of speech and textuality. In other words, the music of Žiga Stanič lives in constant external referencing, referring to phenomena beyond pure musical categories, to the life experience of modern man with historical memory. This is a turning to the world, to the sonority of the world, an opening towards the layers of civilisation, knowledge of the human past, or the rules and laws of the present embedded in classical compositional principles. External referentiality is possible only with an inner, musical application: the composer explores the sonority of speech and language in musical form on the basis of a knowledge of vocal technique and style; sound painting of the city and the natural environment is also embedded in purely musical dramaturgy, a logic of contrasts and formal arcs; the convincing execution of onomatopoeia is only possible with musical reflection. And vice versa: the instrumentalist’s playing must include the experience of listening to the world. In Stanič’s music, this creates a constant pivoting between external and internal musical referencing.
dr. Primož Trdan
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