Chamber orchestra work commissioned and dedicated to Klangforum Wien. It was premiered under the baton of British conductor Clement Power. The piece represents the highest achievement of my compositional technique, complexity, and musical accessibility. The work was awarded the 2014 Grawemeyer Award.
On the Guarding of the Heart is directly inspired by my two previous pieces: I Shall Contemplate... and Le cimetière marin. All three are religious in character: I freely call them “cantatas,” a genre borrowed from and referring to Johann Sebastian Bach’s masterpieces. On the Guarding of the Heart is an instrumental cantata, deriving many of the musical ideas from I Shall Contemplate... Both pieces could be performed attacca, with the latter in second position.
The main theme of On the Guarding of the Heart is the need to return into oneself, to descent with the intellect into the depths of the heart, guard it, and seek there the hidden treasure of the inner kingdom. The music is stimulated by readings of the Philokalia; it is about a hard-achieved detachment, stillness, and watchfulness; solitude and exile.

Djuro Živković