The composer Rudolf Komorous.

In the 1960s the composer Rudolf Komorous shone as one of the most radical and interesting members of the avant-garde in Czechoslovakia. After 1968 like many others he seemed to vanish off the face of the earth--at least from Czechoslovak barbed-wire fenced in perspective. In 2005 he was 74 let, and celebrated his birthday in Victoria in Canada, near the shores of the Pacific Ocean, where he has lived and successfully worked since 1971.

He was born on the 8th of December 1931 in Prague in Zizkov, and his father, first clarinet in the National Theatre Orchestra, influenced his choice of career as professional musician. In the grade school at Amerling Teacher Training Institute he was in the same class as Prince Lobkowicz, whose chauffeur used to let him get out of the Rolls Royce a couple of streets away so he could walk to school with the other children. Rudolf became best friends with the Prince's desk-mate, Josef Podany the son of a tram driver. The small boys here were imbued with a thorough spirit of Masarykian democracy, learnt the importance of education and love of country, even if these ideas sound rather naive in our milieu.

He studied at a modern gymnasium (grammar school), and from the fifth form also studied bassoon at the Prague Conservatory on the wishes of his father (1946-52). Komorous left the conservatory to take up a place at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague (1952-59), continuing his bassoon studies, and then started to study composition in Pavel Borkovec's class.

In 1955 Komorous co-founded the art group known as the Smidrove (the others were the artists Bedrich Dlouhy, Jan Koblasa, Karel Nepras, and Jaroslav Vozniak). They declared their allegiance to an aesthetics of strangeness and played a very important role in the history of Czech art under communism. The Smidrs aesthetics, which despite a period favouring abstraction emphasised the importance of the concrete and had a somewhat Dada-esque ethos, was to have a fundamental influence on Rudolf Komorous's lifelong output.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

In 1957 Komorous won first prize in an international bassoon competition in Geneva (Concours International diExecution Musicale; it was the very first time a Czechoslovak had won such an award). As a result Komorous was able to go for two years at the Conservatory in Beijing in China (1959 - 1961), where he taught bassoon and chamber play. In 1961, after his return from China, Komorous accepted an invitation from the flautist and composer Petr Kotik, founder of the ensemble Musica Viva Pragensis (MVP), to join the ensemble, and he was also engaged as first bassoonist in the opera orchestra of the State Theatre in Prague. Thanks to Komorous there were changes in the composition of the MVP ensemble, which became highly professionalised with the involvement of professors at the conservatory and members of the Czech Philharmonic.

The MVP became one of the best ensembles in the world for the performance of modern music, and its members gave concerts and made recordings in radio studios all over Europe up to 1968. From the very beginning of the 1960s they had contacts with American avant-garde musicians; at the Warsaw Spring festival in 1964, for example, they performed in the group around John Cage. "We in MVP were invited to the Warsaw Autumn. We played there with John Cage and David Tudor for the Merce Cunningham Dance Group and we gave a concert of our own. We played my Olympia there, and it was the official premiere. (We had played it first at the opening of an exhibition of work by Jaroslav Vozniak; people thought it was very interesting but that it was the sort of music you could play at a gallery opening but not in the concert hall. But later they had to change their minds, because we did play it in a concert hall.) (...) Olympia was very successful, and we had to repeat it, and we also played Petr Kotik's Trio dedicated to [composer and theorist] Jan Rychlik, who had died shortly before. That was a longer piece, perhaps around 12 minutes. (Back then people were writing just short pieces, especially the composers of the New Music at the Warsaw Autumn. That was the influence of Webern.) (...) After our appearance, an important article came out about us in Rude pravo [the main communist daily], which damned us and presented us as an irresponsible ensemble out to destroy the reputation of Czech music. It turned the performance into an affair, especially Petr Kotik's piece. It was not true that his Trio was badly received; most of the people in the audience applauded and liked it. Back then it was a kind of fashion for a couple of people to whistle, because a New Music concert wouldn't be a New Music concert without a bit of whistling, would it? When they whistled at Petr's piece, our officials concluded that it was a dreadful failure and shamed Czech music. And then they started a hue and cry after us! The MVP was de facto banned, we had been supposed to be going to Zagreb for the Biennale, but we weren't allowed to and they sent the Czech Noneto instead of us. The audience somehow got to know why we weren't there--there was more freedom in Yugoslavia than at home, and they said publicly that our visit had been prohibited and they had sent the Czech Noneto instead. The noneto, of course, had pieces by composers from the Union [of Czechoslovak Composers and Concert Artists] in their programme. People in the audience got up and left ... (...) After Warsaw they banned us by artificially creating a scandal. The concert hadn't been any kind of scandal, not even the slightest, but on the contrary it had clearly been the most successful concert of the whole Warsaw Autumn."

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

After the "scandal" the activities of the ensemble were gradually revived, but without Petr Kotik, who was studying in Vienna. Two composers, Marek Kopelent as musical director and Zbynek Vostrak (see CM 1/2005) as conductor, came to the MVP and the ensemble started to orientate itself to more standard currents in the New Music that were at least a little more acceptable in the Czech political context. The MVP's activities were to cease definitively only with the Soviet Occupation.

As Rudolf Komorous says he was lucky that he never saw Russian tanks in our country. When they arrived he was recording Wagner's Ring in Nuremberg with Hans Swarovsky for the English gramophone company Westminster. Just by chance his wife Hana was travelling with him and they managed to get their daughter Klara out of the occupied country into Germany after a time. All three said goodbye to Europe in 1969, emigrated to Canada and never regretted the decision.

The first place where Rudolf Komorous taught was in fact MacAllester College in Minneapolis, in the USA (1970 - 1971), where he was recommended by John Cage. His family, however, remained in Canada and although he was very happy at MacAllester College he accepted the offer of a job at the University of Victoria. In 1971 the Komorous family moved to Victoria, one of the islands of British Columbia. Here Komorous worked as a professor of composition and theory, strengthened the position of the music department, founded an electronic music studio, expanded the range of musical disciplines taught, and later reorganised the department as director. He became an acclaimed and sought after teacher of composition, and today many of his former students figure in the Canada composing elite (for example Allison Cameron, Owen Underhill, Chris Butterfield, Linda Catlin Smith). In the years 1989-1994 he was director of the school of contemporary arts at The Simon Fraser University in nearby Vancouver.

Rudolf Komorous divides his mature work into three periods: the minimalist period, the abstract period, and the period of new melody and new harmony.

The Prague compositions written around the mid-1960s fall into the first period, without the author having any idea of the existence of Minimalist art at the time. (He knew the music of Morton Feldman, however, and at the time Komorous did in fact have more affinity with American new music than with the German). He wrote pieces in which, apart from the use of bizarre sound sources, the most striking characteristic is the emptied out nature of musical time. Here his Chinese experience with Zen played a part. The pieces concerned are Sladka kralovna [Sweet Queen], Chanson, Olympia, Mignon and Nahrobek Malevicuv [Malevic's Tombstone]. The last mentioned composition, of 1965, was the first electronic piece publicly presented in Czechoslovakia, and also the first electronic piece released by Supraphon on gramophone record. The first three pieces have been recorded by the Agon Orchestra on the CD Ceska nova hudba 60. Let [Czech New Music of the Sixties; Arta Records 1994].

Rudolf Komorous's abstract period consisted of six pieces from the first half of the 1970s entitled Bez nazvu [Untitled], based on principles of permutation. The second of them, written in 1973 for trumpet, is often played, but Komorous himself comments that "I recognised that it wasn't what I was looking for."

The third period of new melodies and new harmonies had a prologue in an earlier piece, York of 1967. His opera of 1964-66, Lady Blancarosa also falls into this earlier period. A solo opera without accompaniment, it was later performed in Buffalo, New York, Montreal, and Victoria. The opera No no miya of 1988, produced in Vancouver, Victoria and Toronto met with unexpected success.

"Many young composers in my country, Bohemia, regard my last work as a kind of "return to something" and believe that this music is suddenly too traditional. My view, and I'm quite sure of it (someone ought to start to teach it) is that there exists a certain progress in music, and that what was produced in 1950 is now historical music half a century old. There is no point in composing like Webern or Stockhausen, just as out generation realised that we ought not to write like Stravinsky. But it seems to me that this present new generation keeps on thinking that to write like Boulez is real modernism, courage, avant-garde and so on. Although actually today Boulez is the equivalent of Brahms, it's the same thing, historical music, no longer living music, it doesn't exist. Some of these pieces from the past are still amazing, some are just about tolerable and some are pathetic, and that probably includes even the deified Mozart. Art goes on, and today the New Music is a historical term. Music has had to keep on moving in some direction and in my view the path forward is that we need to discover how to compose and invent melodies that are not pre-New Music but post-New Music. (And de facto--even it seems like prising myself, but no, I consider it a fact--I have been the first to take this path from so-called New Music in genuinely new and contemporary directions.). We also have to start from our knowledge of harmony. (...) Today I wouldn't say we know everything about harmony but we know a lot more than anyone in the whole history of music, whether geniuses or normal composer, anyone, because for whole centuries, long centuries, harmony was unusually limited. Now I repeat--once more--new melodies and all the knowledge that we now have about harmony needs to be exploited to enable us to write music that genuinely expresses the situation of today's world. (...)

[GRAPHIC OMITTED]

People often talk about a crisis over the question of whether there is still anything to be done in composition that has not been done before.

I would say that is the task of composers today. It relates to the wave that is returning to melody and harmony. Now almost everyone writes this music and only a few backward composers still think that Boulez is modern, which he used to be and he wrote amazing music, but to write like Boulez today is completely pointless. As I always say: art has to come from life. But not through studying music and saying to ourselves--ah nobody's ever yet done this, so I'll bend it back and forth like this in this direction, and if they used to go up then I'll go down. That kind of originality is artificial. It's dreadfully easy to be original in that kind of way, in the sense of just looking at what has been done and doing it differently and hey presto you're original. Anyone can do that. But the point is whether it's right. Whether the originality comes from the fact that something used to go down and now goes up, or whether it comes from the reality of life today. (...)

You know the trends well, you are in contact with a lot of people and have travelled a great deal in your life. What are the features of composition in Europe? Where is composition going in America, and Canada? Is there a difference between the two continents?

It differs from place to place, I would say. I don't believe that Europe is at one in a certain opinion, but if you look at European music especially from outside, you can see that it's still bogged down in music that has its basis in the music of fifty years ago, and that it hasn't moved on very far. That is also why Penderecki writes a violin concerto that sounds like Romantic music. But the problem lies precisely in recognising, whether the pieces have proper harmony or proper melody, whether they are pre-New Music or post-New Music! Lots of people who write obsolete music, because they have never been capable of thinking up anything else (they write in the spirit of the modernism of the earlier 20th century) are now latching onto what is emerging today and what is being fought for and approached experimentally. (...) As I say: there are plenty of composers who have breathed a sigh of relief, because they were destroyed by the New Music and always battled against it and said it was nonsense and thought they were right! And now, when melodies are being written again, and harmony, it really looks as if they were right. But they were not right!!! We had to get rid of what they were doing and are doing even now. That's my great bugbear! We have to do something absolutely new, something that will work for the future. But it has to be done on the basis of whole centuries of European music and some impulses that we can take from other cultures (Asian, South American and so on), why not? But at bottom our tradition is European. Or to put it in other words, we have to take that tradition, cross over through the modernism of the first half of the 20th century, and properly, thoroughly and deeply study New Music, because without that there is no way out and no way forward. In every conservatory, every academy, everywhere--in Berlin, Prague, Paris--there needs to be a proper course on Webern's music, and it should explain in detail what he actually did, although few people actually know it. (I have spent a great deal of time on Webern and feel a sense of responsibility about it. The study of Webern is a fundamental thing!) Then other directions in new music need to be tackled, in relation to orchestration, forms and with all of that, from Perotin to Boulez, we should look for the music of the present day. That's a terrible term, I know ...

Rudolf Komorous has retired, but he still composers and his music is being published on CD by leading record companies. As he says himself, finally for the first time in his life he can devote himself to composing full time. The most frequent performers of his pieces are the orchestras Arraymusic, Esprit Orchestra, Manitoba Chamber Orchestra, Netherlands Radio Orchestra, Toronto Symphony Orchestra, and the Vancouver Symphony, CBC Radio Orchestra. His piano pieces have been performed, for example by Cornelius Cardew, Eve Egoyan, and Frederic Rzewski, and one of the most recent pieces was dedicated to the harpsichordist Colin Tilneym. He enjoys strong support for his composing activities from the Canadian Music Centre.

Since his emigration in 1968 Rudolf Komorous has never returned to the Czech Republic.

(The passages quoted have been adapted from interviews held by the author with R. Komorous in November 2005 in Victoria.)