Born in Belgrade, Sokolovic moved to Montréal in 1992. Since then, she has become the fourth most performed female opera composer in the world─Svadba, which explores Serbian folkloric themes, has been performed upwards of fifty times in Europe and North America. She has received the Juno Award for Classical Composer of the Year twice, and currently holds the first Canada Research Chair in Opera Creation, as a professor of composition at the Université de Montréal. Clearly, her approach to communicating musical ideas is working. 

Although Sokolovic does not shy away from these accomplishments, she notes that succeeding as a female composer never felt out-of-reach at the beginning of her career. Despite the Western classical music canon’s historically preferential treatment for works written by men, Sokolovic was never made to feel as though she didn't stand just as much of a chance as her male counterparts in school. Having grown up in a communist country, she says, gender did not feel like an obstacle to her as a composer until she moved to Canada.

When Sokolovic composes vocal music, she starts by spending time with the text. She aims to understand the natural cadence of the language she is working with, to grasp the rhythm and inflection of the words before making them sing. Her new work, You Can Die Properly Now, which premiered at the Maison Symphonique de Montréal this spring, presented new linguistic challenges for Sokolovic, as it was the first time she composed music for the poetry of the Mi’kmaq Indigenous peoples. 

Composed for Mi’kmaq soprano Emma Pennel and the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal, the piece is the product of a collaboration between Sokolovic and her friend, the L’nu/Mi’kmaq poet and interdisciplinary artist Michelle Sylliboy. Sylliboy’s art draws inspiration from the Mi’kmaq Komqwejwi’kasikl language, from her personal experiences as a two-spirit artist, and her environment. You Can Die Properly Now tells the story of the indigenous “children found in mass graves across Canada in the last few years.”  Sylliboy opts not to highlight the rage and despair of these discoveries, but instead to infuse her poetry with a “huge force of spirituality and tenderness.” The work reflects on the relationship between death, loss and land.  

While Sylliboy and Sokolovic have vastly different lived experiences, they share a personal investment in this theme—Sylliboy comes to their reflections on death and land as an indigenous person whose life and art is culturally, historically, and materially enmeshed in the land on which she lives and works. Likewise Sokolovic, as an immigrant to Canada who left her first homeland (ex-Yugoslavia) to create a life elsewhere, but whose work remains deeply connected to Balkan folklore and musical traditions. Their perspectives meet in You Can Die Properly Now, Sokolovic’s music tells the story, building on the inherent musicality of Sylliboy’s Mi’kmaq text.