by Ronja Mokranova
Commissioned in 2026 as part of the Portfolio Project.
Program Note
Written for the Ciompi Quartet the piece is based on the composer’s memory of a meadow in the Czech mountains called Javořinka, where the famous Kubelík family lived in a wooden cabin during WWII. Above the cabin is a hill on top of which a rock overlooks the mountains, where Rafael Kubelík used to practice violin. This piece is based on the composer’s childhood spent playing in this forest and on the famous rock, the music representing children’s games and their fictional world.
A key element in the music is the short attention span of a child and the speed at which the character of the game changes, represented by formal organization of musical material akin to a sound mosaic. As a symbolic representation of the unceasing presence of the Kubelík family in this place, this movement also contains reference to a theme from the first movement of Rafael’s Kubelík Quattro Forme Per Archi (1967).
Composer Biography
A second year PhD student at Duke University, Ronja is a multi-instrumentalist, composer of classical music, songwriter, and occasionally a composer for short films. Interested in story-telling and musical narratives, Ronja’s music has been described as “oddly surprising” and has been compared to Liszt, Ravel and Copland by the Boston Intelligencer. Her music has been performed by the Thomas Circle Singers, Loadbang, Dal Niente Ensemble, Hub New Music, The Orange Road String Quartet, Lauren Basney & David Hyun-Su Kim, and Philipp Stäudlin among others, and her single-movement work for violin and piano has received honorable recognition at the Pure Vienna International Music Competition 2024.
Born and raised in Slovakia, she moved to the United States to pursue an education in composition, she holds an MA in Composition from Tufts University, and a BA from Whitman College, where she graduated from with multiple music awards. Today she is a strong advocate for learning music at any age and strives to foster the musical aspiration of those who started musical education only as adults. In her free time, she enjoys writing and producing indie songs, she is an avid hiker and dreams of writing a fantasy novel one day.
