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First name: Ladislav
Last name: Kupkovic
Dates: 1936
Category: Quartet
Nationality: slovakian
Opus name: Kvarteto II B Dur (1986)
Publisher:
Peculiarities: See: http://www.hc.sk/src/oec_noty.php?lg=en&menutyp=noty
Information: From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Ladislav Karol Kupkovič (born March 17, 1936) is a Slovak composer and conductor. Kupkovič was born in Bratislava, and studied violin and conducting there, first at the conservatory, then at the Academy of Performing Arts. He played violin in the Slovak Philharmonic Orchestra from 1960 to 1965, and then began to write music for television and film to make a living. At the same time, he was writing more experimental music for concerts. In 1969 he won a music scholarship to West Berlin, and emigrated there the following year. In 1971, he conducted the premiere of Karlheinz Stockhausen's Mixtur in Cologne, a piece dedicated to Kupkovič himself. In the same year, he began to teach music theory at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater Hannover, and lives in Hanover today. Kupkovič has probably become best known for his experiments with the concert form in the 1970s. In Musik für das Ruhrfestspielhaus (1970), he arranged forty performers to play a number of pieces in a concert hall in Recklinghausen over the course of three hours. The pieces were played in various parts of the building, some of them at the same time. Kupkovič called this kind of concert a Wandelkonzert, and Wandelkonzerte have often invited comparisons to John Cage's Musicircus events. The idea was expanded for Klanginvasion auf Bonn (1971), for which 150 musicians played at various venues in Bonn over the course of twelve hours. There is some similarity here to Trevor Wishart's community pieces like Forest Singularity. Some of the music played in the Wandelkonzerte was written by Kupkovič himself, some of it by other people. Much of it, however, was music by older classical composers which had been altered and adapted by Kupkovič. This process is typical of Kupkovič's instrumental works, and can be seen in such pieces as the series of four Präparierter Texte from 1968. Kupkovič also adapted old pieces by taking small elements from them and repeating them with only slight variation. This technique was used in Morceau de Genre based on a small piece for violin and piano by Edward Elgar. Kupkovič is one of the few composers to have written a significant amount of music for the accordion. As well as the versions of Morceau de Genre, he has written 312-SL / 723 (1978) for two accordions, and in 1980 wrote a concerto for the instrument. This concerto was in the later diatonic style which Kupkovič turned to. The harmonies in these later pieces are very simple, and the works have sometimes been compared to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Kupkovič has been extremely prolific in this style. Although a return to a simpler form of harmony and to older musical forms may be seen as a kind of neo-classicism, it is a very different sort to that used by Igor Stravinsky. Unlike his music, Kupkovič's has no sense of irony and in many cases could be confused for a piece from the classical music era.