Jerica Oblak is a Slovenian-American acoustic and electronic composer interested in microtonal/spectral music and multimedia. Her orchestral, chamber, and choir pieces have been performed by orchestras, chamber ensembles, and vocal groups in Europe, Asia, and the Americas. She worked with groups such as the Slovenian Symphony Orchestra, the New Band, SoundClock, Trio Neos, RTV Choir, Ensemble Assisi Musica, Canby Singers, as well as the Lumina, Cosmos, and Slovenian string quartets. Her compositions were featured at venues such as the ISCM World New Music Days in Shanghai, Merkin Hall, Symphony Space, Kosciusko Foundation, Cankarjev Dom, Slovenian Philharmony, Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre, World Science and Engineering Society Conference, as well as numerous contemporary music festivals around the world. Oblak received national and international composition awards including the First Prize in Chamber Music Composition Competition in Tampa Bay, Florida, and the Trento Cinema Award at the International Film Music Competition chaired by Ennio Morricone. Jerica Oblak created many music videos and underscored a number of films and TV episodes, including Highlander: The Raven. She composed incidental music for theatre plays, including The Seagull, and collaborated with visual artists, choreographers, and dancers on various multimedia projects/installations.
The majority of Oblak’s electronic music is composed in her musical system Augmentation Matrix. It is a process of modifying perceptual consonance by applying stretched harmonic synthesis to the corresponding microtonal tuning and spectral structuring. New intervalic hierarchies based on pseudo-octaves allow her to experiment with alternative sonic and harmonic algorithms. Jerica Oblak’s theoretical interest also lies in the research of film music. She focuses on the contextual analysis of sound-image counterpoint and the exploration of our cross-domain perception. Her Ph.D. dissertation and her thesis defended at the University of Ljubljana are among the earliest capstone writings on the topic.
Dr. Jerica Oblak received her M.A. and Ph.D. in Composition and Theory from the University of Pittsburgh, Artist Diploma from the Yale School of Music, B.M. in Music Education, and B.M. in Composition from the University of Ljubljana. She studied composition with Marijan Gabrijelčič, Eric Moe, and Ezra Laderman, microtonal music with Mathew Rosenblum, and film scoring with Paul Chihara. She joined the NYU faculty in 2001, teaching composition and courses such as Collegium: Concert Composition, Contemporary Trends in Music Education, and Colloquy in Music. She also developed a new course, Seminar in Composition: Innovation, culminating in the final performance, innOVATION, at the cutting edge MARL studio.