Kolarac Opens 'Andrija Cikic' Contest for Young Composers
The Kolarac Endowment has opened its fourth memorial competition for young composers, named after Andrija Cikic, with support from the Ministry of Culture and RTS. Deadline is October 20.
On the evening when the last applause fades in the Great Hall of the Kolarac Endowment, a piano piece written by a child of ten or fourteen will ring out again, this time arranged for string orchestra, in front of an audience and a professional jury. That evening is still months away, but the road to it has just opened: the Kolarac Endowment has launched its fourth Memorial Competition for the Best Young Composers, named after Andrija Cikic, and applications close on October 20.
The competition runs with support from Serbia’s Ministry of Culture and Radio Television of Serbia (RTS), and the full rules are posted on the Kolarac website, kolarac.rs. It is open to children and young people between the ages of 10 and 19, split into two age groups: 10 to 14, and 14 to 19. The split is not a formality but an acknowledgment that a child who is only just learning notation and a teenager with several years of composing behind them should not be judged by the same measure. Each entrant submits a single composition for piano or another harmonic instrument, running three to five minutes, a length short enough to perform live for the jury yet long enough to carry a complete musical idea rather than a sketch.
How Do the Chosen Compositions Reach the Final?
After the first round of selection, the chosen compositions are performed in a semifinal. The winners of that round advance to the gala final, held in the very same Great Hall of the Kolarac Endowment, where the young composers hear their own music performed live and professionally for the first time, arranged for the instrument they wrote for and accompanied by a string orchestra. For a child who composed a piece for piano alone in their bedroom, that means the notes on paper suddenly fill an entire concert hall.
The competition is named after Andrija Cikic, born March 5, 2009, in Belgrade. He had played piano since the age of six and, by his teenage years, had collected multiple first prizes at national and international music competitions, along with a special recognition for his performance of “Burgmuller Etude in D Major” in 2019. He performed at numerous concerts, took part in the international competition “Virtuozi V4+, We Play in a Common Language,” and in November 2020 served on the national jury that judged performers at Serbia’s Junior Eurovision Song Contest selection. Outside music, he loved languages and mathematics, played tennis competitively, took photographs and made videos, and, despite all of that, always found time for his friends. Andrija Cikic was killed in May 2023, in the shooting at the Vladislav Ribnikar Elementary School in Belgrade.
The memorial competition is an institutional response to that loss, but it is built as a stage rather than a monument. Instead of letting the name stay tied only to the date of the tragedy, Kolarac places it, year after year, next to something that is actually happening: the applications that come in, the rehearsals before the semifinal, the orchestra gathering for the final night. Each new cycle of the competition brings another generation of ten and seventeen year olds who sit down at a piano with an idea of their own to write, and it is that turnover of young composers, more than anything else, that keeps the name active rather than fixed to a single record.
The fourth edition continues the same formula as the previous three: applications, selection, semifinal, then a final evening in a hall where, as the rules put it, music is the only criterion. Entries are accepted until October 20, and the full rules, application form and remaining deadlines are available on the Kolarac Endowment’s website.
