Croatian Composers’ Society awarded book on the Sorkočevićes by Vjera Katalinić

Zagreb, September 2015

Vjera Katalinić, leader of the HERA MusMig project, was awarded with the “Josip Andreis” Prize of Croatian Composers’ Society, for her contributions to the field of musicology and music journalism, for her bilingual book (in Croatian and English) “Sorkočevići, dubrovački plemići i glazbenici / The Sorkočevićes: Aristocratic Musicians from Dubrovnik”, published in 2014 by the Croatian Music Information Center. Book covers and brings together previous research into the careers in music of Luka and Antun Sorgo (and one chapter is devoted to an associate member of the family, shown to have been “the first Croatian woman composer”, Jelena Pozza-Sorgo/Pucić-Sorkočević). At the same time, their work has been placed in the context of the happenings of the time, their primary occupations and the domestic and international forces that affected them from the musical point of view. The accompanying recordings, that cover all the instrumental compositions that can with certainty to be ascribed to Luka Sorgo, are interpreted by the ensemble Salzburger Hofmusik led by Wolfgang Brunner. The purpose of this book is not to show only how these Ragusan musicians worked, but to place them in their pertaining social, political and cultural contexts and thus to find the reasons and stimuli for their procedures outside the musical context. It would seem that some earlier uncertainties have thus been solved, and yet precisely through such new understandings, unburdened with the weight of history, some fresh questions have arisen.