Create--and do what you will.

Jan Klusak long ago won himself a firm place among the classics of Czech music of the later 20th Century. He is a remarkable man in many respects. As a musician he is a relatively unique case of a "pure" composer, who devotes himself only to composition rather than spreading his activities over other possible musical professions. Even so, he is a many-sided person: writer, journalist, film and theatre actor, astrologer ... Since November 1989 he has even been taking a more conspicuous role in public life.

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The author of a book on Klusak, Ivan Polednak, would probably aphoristically sketch Klusak as follows: "The descendant of poor plebeian Czechs and affluent Jews hit by the Holocaust. An heir to the traditions of "Czech national music" (Klusak has a great and humble admiration for the works of Smetana) and also heir to the distinctive traditions of the "Czech-German-Jewish-Prague" culture symbolised by names like Rilke, Kafka, Brod, Meyrink, Werfel, Kisch, and Schulhoff. These are apparently very disparate areas full of internal paradoxes, and perhaps that is one reason why Klusak's own music is so characteristically esoteric. On the other hand, he has also written fully functional music for the mass TV serial Hospital on the Edge of Town. Klusak honours spiritual values, but also enjoys succumbing to bodily temptations. He is a man of remarkable vitality and strong health who refuses to engage in sport on principle. He is a composer working in a strictly rational style, but at the same time he believes in a magic power that rules the world, life and creativity. Klusak is someone who never flirted with the communist regime and who even today does not let his political attitudes overshadow his vocation as an artist. Klusak is a person who avoids public jostling for position, grandeur and pomp--but at the same time shows extraordinary toughness and principle in public matters and in matters of artistic integrity. He is an individual par excellence, the opposite of a "herd animal", but a man who has no yen to publicly stand out above the others either. Instead he is unshowy and inconspicuous, convinced that what makes a person into a man of stature is above all his work, what he demonstrably knows how to do and what he has achieved." In matters of music Klusak is admirably serious, admirably sober and tolerant, as will soon be apparent. In ordinary communications he has a wonderfully personal sense of humour. As with all deeply educated and many-sided people, an interview with Jan Klusak is an intellectual treat sui generis. I am delighted to have had the opportunity to talk to him in what is a personal jubilee year (he celebrated his seventieth birthday on the 18th of April).

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Let's start this interview with the present. How does a seventy-year-old feel in a contemporary musical world of which he is still a part?

I live my life these days thinking mainly about the fundamental thing that art should be about. Recently it was formulated very well by the poet Miloslav Topinka, who published a poetic composition Trhlina [The Crack] (and won the Seifert Prize for it). It is one long poem divided into small parts. What Topinka constantly emphasises (and not only in this poem, but in various interviews) is the Rimbaudian (but also for example Holanian) attempt to get via art beyond some frontier, as it were to "break through" into some other dimension, to get through that "crack in the heavens" somewhere beyond this reality. Of course this can't last long, or at least can't last forever. It is something like a mystical state: either you stay there for good, and have die there too, or else you come back to this world. I would like this interview of ours to be based on that idea, because it seems to me that music has three basic stages of development. First monophony, then polyphony, which music essentially lived by up to the 20th century, and then modern music, which has been as it were striving for some kind of self-transcendence, as if it wanted yet to change its state again and become a kind of "radiance" or better still "radiation outwards". But this has only been achieved in a few exceptional cases. In my view Vares has managed it in some of his works, for example, or Boulez or Stockhausen--but let me emphasise that it is very exceptional even with them.

Only the shift from monophony to polyphony meant first and foremost a complication of the texture, while in my view that quality of a "new state" in 20th-century music isn't comparable to that previous development. Modern music is still polyphonic or a type of polyphonic structure on the same level. So the transformation must have happened (or be happening) on some different level.

You're right. One feature common to monophony and polyphony was a kind of linear development in time. What is new in 20th-century music has brought--or been striving to bring--a halt to this time movement in music, as it were, exchanging the progression for radiation from a point, emanation. This is movement as well, but of a completely different quality.

But the radiation was certainly present in monophony as well. Gregorian chant had it almost in its job description. And so it probably can't be considered the distinguishing mark of music in the "post-polyphonic stage".

Once I studied Gregorian chant quite intensively and it struck me that it might be possible to create a kind of dense polyphony by linking up many melodies of Gregorian chant together. I tried this in my electronic piece O sacrum convivium--which is an antiphony on Corpus Christi.

Would it not then be possible to define the characteristic features and trends in 20th-century music more in terms of material, and at the level of the musical (or more precisely acoustic) expressive techniques?

Today that is a very complicated question and hard to answer. We don't yet have enough distance on it, or enough material that would allow us to generalise. What became very visible in 20th-century music and a far more active aspect than before is the parameter of timbre--today there are few people who would challenge that.

What does creating music mean to you? On other occasions you have of often said that for you composing is an intrinsic need, a libido. On the other hand there are composers who see their motivation differently, more as a question of the challenge of a compositional problem. This was (and maybe still is) one very strong and widespread motive particularly among composers of the post-war avant garde. The solution of a kind of algorithm, of some sort of previously set, often mathematically expressed project.

But the libido could be precisely in that ...

All right, but let's try and stay away from libido, perhaps below the level of libido. I would like to look more at the material and techniques by which libido is processed. In artistic creation is there a prime place for spontaneity, for intuitive emotional and who-knows-what activity--or is the priority more that of ratio, reason, the perfectly thought out calculation, which is then just "embodied in the given material" in the next creative phase?

You see, I've gone through all those phases. At the beginning composing was the purely intuitive process for me, and it surprised me to think that you could in some way rationally calculate while composing. Gradually, however, I reached the opposite extreme--rational thinking. But it was still always "libido" with me as well. Otherwise I wouldn't have done it at all. I think that both approaches are needed. It's always a pleasant "game with notes" and at the same time a rationally motivated task. The artist sets himself a standard that he then tries to overcome. This is a natural quality we call ambition. In my own creative work I combine the two perspectives you mention. I can't say that in the process I particularly care about making the structure of the work clear and recognisable, and how the individual "cogwheels" fit with each other. I think that when someone is lucky enough to produce a work or series of works that are successful enough for him to be regarded by the outside world as a creative artist and for his products to be called art, then it does seem to have all "slotted into place" even for him, but at the same time it is a living, viable organism. I have been lucky that when I dreamt up some pattern, let us say, or some structural model to be tackled, then some composition has come out of it.

Do you see it as a matter of chance or some thing that is and inevitable attribute of the "true creator"?

I don't know how other colleagues feel about it, but for myself I think what probably happens is that what you might think of as the Socratian "daimonium" in a person keeps watch on that subconscious activity and constantly regulates and "tunes" the subconscious and conscious level of creation in line with inborn attributes, with character, with what it is that is the individual in every individual.

What is your view of the vocation of the artist in the modern world? I'm thinking of anything from "craftsman" to "prophet sent from heaven".

I have never thought much about it. The role of "prophet" was definitively demolished in the 20th century by civilians like Stravinsky, Martinu, Poulenc ... But the common denominator is the example of responsible work, the striving for the absolute. You must always give it your best shot. Every artist creates with the feeling that he is creating a work of art, because otherwise it would be impossible: creating with the feeling that I am not creating a work of art would be demotivating. Of course, the process by which the feeling of a "work of art" arises in society is a more complicated matter.

Roman Berger in his reflections distinguishes between creation and production. Naturally production has the quantitative edge--it is like the relationship between the average and the work of genius. The one is impossible without the other.

How far is your work bound up with astrology, "the harmony of the spheres" and the associated mysticism?

On the one hand it has certainly helped me to find my "Archimedian fixed point", without which I might well not be here at all. On the other hand I think music might come even without that. Astrology and so on has helped me intellectually, and it changes you in terms of view of the world and religious ideas--but music can be made without that. For me those ideas are the source of that fixed horizon in the cosmos. In this way I get some kind of different view from outside. I get outside the co-ordinates of music, which at the beginning, "before the music comes", is very important. And os course there is also a mythology involved that has always been a great inspiration for art.

Today people sometimes talk of structureless music.

Without structure there is nothing--not even the non-European music that is often brought up when people argue the case.

Are you in contact with the work of the youngest generation?

To be frank, not very much. Maybe one reason is that I have never taught composition and don't intend to now.

You are also an opera composer. Do you believe opera still has any meaning in the world today?

I would very much wish that it did have. Opera always has to be a little more accessible, popular, and comprehensible than that "high" concert music. Here we face the questions of whether that "radiation" I mentioned is possible in opera as well. I very much hope that opera finally achieves the radiation (certainly, Wagner tried and succeeded). In modern opera I think Messiaen achieved something of the sort in his opera about St. Francis of Assisi.

Do you think any of your operas has the same tendency?

No, in my operas to date I have so far only practised within the tradition. And if I ever manage to produce something more original, more mine, I wouldn't be so annoyed.

Are you planning something like that?

Yes, but I would rather not go into detail about it now. I'll just say that it would be a type of full-length one-acter, like Strauss's Salome or Elektra.

Once I saw the "Bunch of Critical Blooms", views of the critics on your work that you sent round to your friends and acquaintances on your fiftieth birthday What's your opinion of critics and journalists today?

I think that the members of this profession are the same as in other professions. There's an elite minority of "creators" (genuinely!!!--in the Salda sense), and then a majority of "producers"--and alse a certain (probably necessary--like everywhere) percent of greaseballs including immoral scum. But without critics things don't work. That critical reflection is necessary!

Have you ever felt that a critic of your work was right, or even learned something from criticism?

Certainly--I learned a lot for example from Miroslav Srnka's interesting analytical study based on a comparison of three pieces (Miloslav Kabelac--Zrcadleni [Mirroring], Lubos Fiser: 15 listu podle Durerovy Apokalypsy [Fifteen Leaves after Durer's Apocalypse] and Jan Klusak: Variace na tema G. Mahlera [Variations on a Theme by G. Mahler]). Srnka comes to very remarkable conclusions, which pleased me partly because he is a young man and partly because I don't know him well and he didn't come and consult the thing with me, and so he came to his conclusions purely and simply on the basis of information from the music itself.

Do there exist certain typical themes in contemporary music (drugs, perversions, homosexuality, deviations, suicide, psychiatric institutions)? Sometimes I feel an absence of positive motivations here.

The man who mistook his wife for a hat etc. Yes. This general negativism is very typical of themes of art in recent years--paranoiac states, the impossibility of partnership relations, inability to find a fixed point ... Certainly it relates to the state of life at the moment.

Isn't contemporary music too easily giving up on its chances of communicability? Sometimes it seems to me that contemporary composers haven't even tried to be accessible.

What actually is comprehensibility in music? Music is comprehensible in the same way as birdsong, or clouds merging, while "understanding nature" is a pretty strange and overblown expression. "To like" doesn't have to mean "to understand". It's a question of what art wants. I personally hope that when my work works for me, when I understand it, then other listeners will like it and understand it as well, even if they may like it and understand it in a different way than I do. But that contact is nonetheless created.

What about music for film--or other music "over the picture"? You wrote the music for the famous serial "Hospital on the Edge of Town" for example. Has this line of your work continued?

Thank God no. I love film and in the sixties I was up to my ears in it (as an actor as well), but I don't like writing film music. For me it is "lost music", where you are not your own master and have to respect the screenplay and the director ... Sometimes it entertained me writing for example a brass march so that "it was indistinguishable from Kmoch".

On the other hand, composing in set styles is one of the skills a professional composer has to have....

Yes, and Profesor Janecek used to tell us that a future professional ought to practice for example writing something a la Mozart. But then it becomes clear who the genuinely creative person is. The person who gets Mozart down to the last detail and is indistinguishable from him most probably doesn't have true creative talent ... And that's the issue in film music as well.

So, given this scepticism, why did you ever take on writing the music for "Hospital on the Edge of Town"?

The reasons were the most prosaic possible. It was a decision out of necessity, I had almost nothing to live on back then, and in such a situation I didn't have much choice. Hospital (1977) didn't have any sequel as far as I was concerned, with one exception--just after the revolution in November 1989 I did the music for Jiri Menzel's film adaptation of Vaclav Havel's "The Beggar's Opera". And I did it with gusto, because it was precisely that "fake Rossini".

Which of your colleagues and contemporaries knows how to write "supremely creative--individual" film music?

But that's common knowledge--we all know it was Lubos Fiser, Svatopluk Havelka and a number of others ... and then professionals in the field, for example of the stature of Zdenek Liska.

And anyway of course, film music in the past was not like it is today, when musical colouring is so easy to add to the picture and manipulate using studio equipment.

Well yes, and let's remember the kind of highly artistically autonomous music for films written by composers of the stature of Honegger, for example. That music comes out today on CD as music in its own right ... But these days I'm an old gentlemen and first and foremost I want to devote myself to "my monuments", symphonic and operatic.

You are a pioneer of dodecaphony among Czech composers. In your view does the dodecaphony as a system, a creative principle, a compositional technique still have any meaning at the beginning of th 21st century? Or is it an anachronism?

Schonbergian dodecaphony probably no longer has any point, and has been exhausted. But the principle of dodecaphony can still be exploited and in a very versatile way too. One of the many possibilities is geometric manipulation, for example, which is what I work with myself.

Can the Schonbergian principle be combined with others? Is so, with which? Won't the result of a combination like that be just an impure hotchpotch?

My answer to the first part of your question would be yes, dodecaphony can be combined with other systems and principles. For example with micro-intervals, I could imagine a quarter-tone serial system--a kind of "double dodecaphony"--and for years now I've been intending a piece like that.

As far as the hotchpotch point is concerned, mixing different elements need not just lead to an impure muddle, but might for example create a compact alloy with completely new qualities--and that is of course desirable. After all, even Schonberg later mixed his originally very orthodox dodecaphony with non-dodecaphonic elements and think what we could say about Berg! Even such a giant as Shostakovich somewhere wrote that Wozzek was a dodecaphonic work. That's the impression it gives--it's a mixture and yet it's a stylistically pure work.

Inventions -- one of the key concepts and products of your work and personality, one which forms the spine, as it were, of your work to date. Inventions are certainly at the heart of your conception of dodecaphony. Do they represent a kind of distilled out form, a world unto itself, the earliest achieved point on the road to an ideal in which the results of striving in other compositionsal fields are as it were recapitulated and stored, or are they tightly linked to "non-inventions"? For example, what do your famous Variations on a Theme by G. Mahler have in common with the following series of Inventions?

The Variations on Mahler are naturally from the line of Inventions--except that they are more intuitive. I have already mentioned Srnka's analytical study that compares works of Kabelac, Fiser and my Variations. Srnka writes for example that especially in Variations I have not achieved that ideal of complete "dissolution of the theme", and that I still have thematically recognisable surfaces and passages--which is true. The Inventions differ from the Variations, for example, in the sense that in the inventions I gradually reached absolute serialism as it appears in Boulez, Nono, Stockhausen. In the Inventions "everything is dissolved"--it is simply pure seriality--there is no theme there, nor even any melody. But what makes Variations variations is just the fact that they keep to the theme to be varied. And they really keep to it--even if that tendency to the gradual dissolution and repeated decomposition of the theme is deliberate, and I think that I managed to express it quite eloquently and persuasively in compositional terms.

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The trend to that "dissolution of the theme" is a process that followed later in Inventions. In your view as the composer, when was the ideal state actually achieved?

Not until the Sixth Invention.

How many Inventions you have written so far?

Ten. The first in 1961 and so far the last in 1992.

Back to the issue of mixing different approaches: alea or logos?

Those are two poles that on the contrary should not be mixed (actually, they cannot be mixed at all), but they can be combined. For me personally both are important, but logos is more important. That order is very important for a work, if not the most important thing.

So we shall not achieve a work through aleatorics?

But of course we shall. John Cage wrote real works, but their order is somewhere else--it is behind the structure, perhaps above it. This order has a spiritual dimension, it is in the contemplation to which the piece gives direction, which it "moderates", in this way aspiring to be part of a higher order--like all true works of art. I remember a conversation I had a very long time ago with the painter and sculptor Jan Koblasa sometime at the beginning of the sixties, when there was a growing interest in abstract art in this country. At that time Koblasa had done these abstract pictures a la Pollock, which at first sight were reminiscent of printed circuits (back then this was the entirely new craze in modern miniaturised electrical technology) and I wanted him to explain to me what the meaning of these artefacts was, Koblasa looked out of the window and pointed out the tracks left by cars in the mud. "There is an order in that," he said to me, "but you understand it only when there is more than one of these tracks and when you look at them from a long way above". I think that many composers have given their works a similar order, very strikingly in the case of Iannis Xenakis, for example. Today it is common for people to think seriously about order in chaos.

What is your view of the possibility and productiveness of combining what is called "classical, serious" music with jazz or even rock? The young generation of composers today are very interested in this area. Has it ever said anything to you?

Once again this problem revolves round the centre question of the creative integrity of such an approach. In principle there can be no objections to contacts between so-called serious music and jazz or rock. I have always been impressed by the brilliant way Stravinsky, Martinu, Schulhoff, Jezek and others managed to combine jazz with serious music. I must admit that it has tempted me as well, but somehow I never got round to it in practice. So in my case it's not a case of rejection, but more of a chance set of circumstances.

Does that means that you have really never written a piece with jazz elements?

Actually I have. For Jiri Hlavac's Baroque Jazz Quintet I wrote something, more or less a trifle, called Shaking Pears. It was a reference to Shakespeare (at the time I was writing an opera on Twelfth Night), whose name used to be a source of jokes even with his contemporaries and especially his rivals. Anyway, to cut it short, the piece uses jazz elements, which was partly because of the group I was writing for, of course.

I simply can't resist asking you for a brief profile of your work through your own eyes. Which of your works do you regard as milestones in your development as a composer hitherto?

My independent composing career began with Music for a Fountain for wind quintet in 1954--it's Neo-Classicism and akin to the style of Isa Krejci. The next piece that was important in terms of my evolution was Four Small Voice Exercises, or Pictures for 12 Wind Instruments in 1960. That was the first time I got to grips with the dodecaphony.

If I'm not mistaken, Libor Pesek's Chamber Harmonic had the lion's share of responsibility for getting you to write these pieces.

Yes, they needed repertoire and every other I wrote some music for their every other concert.

And then came Variations on a Theme by G. Mahler.

I completed those in 1962. After the Variations I spent several years looking for the "formula of invention" and found it in the 6th Invention for Nonet (1969). There I achieved that effect of "dissolution of the tone row" or "dissolution of the theme", that as M. Srnka writes, is not yet present in the Variations on a Theme by G. Mahler. Then I started searching again, this time for a way out of that uniformity and sameness, and I found it, I hope, in the 3rd String Quartet in 1975. After that, my development has not involved any more branching off. There are some pieces that deviate more from the main line, like Tetragrammaton sive Nomina Eius, for example (which is the 10th Invention)--and then Zemsky raj to na pohled [Paradise on Earth] when I wanted to try out some new, or more precisely different possibilities of tonality. And then Osa casu [The Axis of Time], for the moment my last important composition.

You mentioned one isolated composition, that has had no successors--that "trifle" with jazz elements for the Baroque Jazz Quintet. As far as isolation is concerned its counterpart is clearly O sacrum convivium--which is so far your only electro-acoustic piece. Is it really the only one and if so, why did it stay that way?

Because just at the time I had a lively interest in electro-acoustic music came those "dry years" when I wasn't allowed into any electro-acoustic studio. And today I have different interests. I am in the middle of a symphony and also something for the theatre, and so probably now I won't get round to electro-acoustic music.

What led you to abandon Neo-Classicism? After all, in your early period you wrote more pieces in this style than just the Music for Fountain. I can recall the Concerto grosso or the three symphonies, at random.

There were several reasons why I suddenly felt that the old traditional forms were exhausted, for example the sonata forms that had been a support to me at the beginning. One of them could have been the fact that after finishing my studies, for a year and a half I found myself outside my real life with music, as it were, because I had to do military service. When I came back to civilian life, I suddenly saw many things in a different light. I hadn't spent my time in the Army Arts Ensemble, but with a combat unit, and in its way this had salutary effects. As relates to the 3rd Symphony you mentioned, it definitely isn't Neo-Classical. I wrote that after my return from the army, when I had begun to look for a way out of Neo-Classicism. First I wrote the 1st, 2nd and 5th movements, which are still a kind of "halfway house" in that respect, but the 3rd and 4th movements were written later and they are already dodecaphonic. I wrote them after I had completed the Pictures, and quite possibly the 1st Invention as well.

So far you have written three symphonies and all of them fall into your early period. Have you ever considered writing a Fourth, or even more?

I'm thinking of writing a big vocal symphony in Mahlerian format. Perhaps it could be called Song of the World.

Instrumental concertos are also among the traditional genres. I know you wrote a bassoon concerto in your youth. Nothing else?

Oh yes. I also wrote a flute Concertino and a saxophone concerto--it hasn't been performed here yet and was written for Holland, where it was presented. And in 1995 I even wrote a piano concerto. I am not a pianist and so I don't know how to do the traditional piano stylisation. But despite that, or maybe just because of it, I had a go. It has not yet been performed here yet.

You clearly and indisputably belong to the musical generation that we symbolically call the Sixties Generation. As a witness and joint creator of this important stage could you tell our readers something more about the distinctive features of musical life in the sixties?

Jan Tausinger, Jan Kapr, Zbynek Vostrak and a number of others--with these people the sixties brought a radical transformation of their style as composers. In my view the process was the most organic with Tausinger. He is a composer we ought to remember. In his case the transformation took place relatively smoothly, and in my view artistically responsibly as well, by which I mean, for example, that he didn't publicise his preparatory, study compositions in the new style for a long time, and it was only when he felt that he was "at home" with the new materials and the new techniques that he had pieces performed, ones that were already not too derivative. There were also composers for whom the transition to New Music was obviously a last resort, but that's not a specifically Czech issue. I myself did not immediately jump on all those various currents springing out of Darmstadt, which were the most influential in this country. I started from the detail and gradually worked my way through to dodecaphony.

In the fifties where did you get information about twelve-tone and modern music in the West? Where could you hear music of this type actually played? If I'm not mistaken the official sources were nugatory.

In fact there were some sources here. People who were well informed, included Mirko Ocadlik, for example, or Jaroslav Seda, who can take the credit for the legendary Theatre of Music in Opletalova Street. This had a relatively well-stocked and publicly accessible phonoteque with the music that wasn't officially performed. And then there were private sources: in Prague there were several private collectors and owners of good recording libraries with this attractive music. There would be private listening sessions in their flats. One was the photographer Josef Sudek, and I was a frequent guest in his flat in the Lesser Town. Sudek had mainly Stravinsky and Honegger--and on standard records. Another source was Milan Munclinger, for instance, who also owned a very extensive record library, which musical Prague was well aware of. In the sixties we used also to meet at Eduard Herzog's place. He didn't have his own recordings but he was employed at Supraphon and used to borrow them from there. And then there was another man to whom I went only for the Rite of Spring--it was a pre-war recording on standard Columbia records (so a set of about 15 records) with Stravinsky conducting. And I listened to this recording many times with the score in my hands. That man's name was F. A. Kypta, and he knew a great deal about Stravinsky. He possessed not just recordings, but plenty of scores from abroad.

Did you ever visit Darmstadt yourself--the Mecca of Czech modernists of the Sixties?

No, but I was definitely in indirect contact with the Darmstadt environment. Ultimately I wrote my 2nd Invention as a commission from Darmstadt and it was premiered there in 1963, conducted by Bruno Maderna. They invited me to the premiere, but the Union of Composers was against it and so I never got there. It was one of those absurdities that seem to me today more comic than anything else. That time instead of me one of the politically correct representatives of the Union went there and his pieces were assigned to the Darmstadt curiosities department.

How did they get to know about you in Darmstadt when you had never been there in person?

Most probably from the Polish magazine Ruch muzyczny, where they wrote a lot about me.

Today people often talk about a general tendency to dumbing down and vulgarisation in culture and art ...

These trends are real and spreading like weeds, which upsets me. Once upon a time "vulgarisation" had a creative aspect, as a means of breaking through the rigid official and officious "white collar" culture. But today it has become something very decadent and very low, because it is often a cover for cultural inadequacy. There is only one possible defence against it and that is an individual defence: to be uncompromisingly decent.

Can an artist do just as he or she wants? I am thinking of one of the possible slogans of post-modernity.

I would remind us of a sentence of St. Augustine: "Love and do what you will". I modify it in my own way: Create, then, have an idea and do what you will. After all, to love in the true sense of the word is a matter of genius. Love is one of the ways of breaking through into that other dimension we talked about at the beginning.

Jan Klusak

Czech composer (but also theatre and film actor, writer and journalist), born on the 18th of April 1934 in Prague.

He attended academic high school (school-leaving examination 1953), and then studied composition at the Prague Conservatory (with Jaroslav Ridky) and the Music Faculty of the Faculty of Performing Arts (with Pavel Borkovec). As a composer his starting-point was Neo-Classicism (Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Isa Krejci). From the Autumn of 1959 he worked for some years with Libor Pesek's Chamber Harmonic. This gave Klusak the impulse to a new creative orientation in the direction of the then New Music. He wrote a number of pieces for the Chamber Harmonic, the most important including Obrazy pro 12 dechovych nastroju [Pictures for 12 Wind Instruments], Ctyri mala hlasova cviceni na texty Franze Kafky [Four Small Voice Exercises on Texts by Franz Kafka] and 1st Invention.

In these pieces Klusak gradually made the transition to the dodecaphony and the poetics of the 2nd Vienna School. Following on from this shift he wrote Variations on a Theme by Gustav Mahler in 1960-62, which is generally regarded as Klusak's most important work so far. In the 60s Klusak also did a great deal of work in film--as a composer of film music and directly as an actor.

After August 1968 he was marginalised by the communist regime. At this time, however, he also worked with the satirical Theatre of Jara Cimrman. In his composing work he gradually developed his own individual form of the invention and in 1975 created another milestone work in the form of his 3rd String Quartet. Following November 1989 Klusak "returned to the public" and took on several public posts (artistic board of the Prague Spring, advisor on repertoire at the National Theatre, offices in the Arts Association [Umelecka beseda]) and received a series of awards. He lives and works in Prague.

RELATED ARTICLE

Selection of Work: The spine of Klusak's work to date consists of nine Inventions for various combinations of instruments and five string quartets. He has written as many as 200 pieces to date.

Hudba k vodotrysku [Music for a Fountain] for wind quintet, 1954

Concerto for Bassoon and Orchestra, 1954-55

String Quartet no. 1, 1955-56

Concerto grosso, 1957

Symphony no. 1, 1956

Symphony no. 2, 1959

Symphony no. 3, 1960

Obrazy pro 12 dechovych nastroju [Pictures for 12 Wind Instruments], 1960

Ctyri mala hlasova cviceni na texty Franze Kafky [Four Small Voice Exercises on Texts by Franz Kafka], 1960

1st Invention for Chamber Orchestra, 1961

Variations on a Theme by Gustav Mahler, 1962

2nd Invention for Chamber Orchestra, 1962

3rd Invention for Strings, 1962

String Quartet no. 2, 1961-62

4th Invention for Orchestra, 1964

1-4-3-2-5-6-7-10-9-8-11 for Solo Flute, 1965

5th Invention for Wind Quintet, 1965

Rondo for Piano, 1967

O sacrum convivium (Motet Concrete), 1968

6th Invention for Nonet, 1969

Mourning Monody for I. Stravinsky, 1972

7th Invention for Large Orchestra, 1972-73

8th Invention for Small Orchestra, 1973

Jupiter, Duet for Clarinet and Cello, 1973

Sonata for Percussion Instruments, 1974

3rd String Quartet, 1975

Lev [The Lion], Duet for Flute and Piano, 1977

Luna v zenitu [Luna at the Zenith]. Four Poems by A. Akhmatova for Mezzo Soprano, Clarinet, Viola and Piano, 1981

4th String Quartet, 1990

10th Invention "Tetragrammaton Sive Nomina Eius" for Large Orchestra, 1992

5th String Quartet "Great passacaglia", 1994

Concerto for Piano and Orchestra, 1994-95

Stage Music (selection):

Bertram a Mescalinda aneb Potrestana vernost [Bertram and Mescalinda or Fidelity Punished]. Opera-pasticcio, 1974-82

Dvanacta noc aneb Cokoli chcete [Twelfth Night or What You Will]. Opera in 2 Acts, 1985

Povidka o Aucassinovi a Nicolette [The Tale of Aucassin and Nicolette]. Singspiel, 1986

Kral se zlatou maskou [The King with the Golden Mask]. Ballet, 1986

Hero a Leandros [Hero and Leander]. Ballet, 1988

Dybuk aneb bludna duse [Dybbuk or the Wanderinf Soul]. Play with singing, 1995

Zprava pro akademii [Reports for the Academy]. Chamber Opera, 1992-96