Milko Kelemen

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Milko Kelemen

Milko Kelemen (born March 30, 1924 in Podravska Slatina ; † March 8, 2018 in Stuttgart ) was a Yugoslav or Croatian composer living in Germany . In 1959 he founded the Zagreb Biennale , of which he was honorary president. The Milko Kelemen Days are held annually in May in Slatina, where mainly his chamber music works are performed. Kelemen was Professor of Composition at the State University for Music and Performing Arts in Stuttgart . He has received numerous honors for his achievements as a composer.

Live and act

As a minor, Kelemen fought as a partisan in the mountains of Yugoslavia . He started his studies at the Zagreb Music Academy . He then studied with Olivier Messiaen in Paris and Wolfgang Fortner in Freiburg . From 1957 Kelemen participated in the summer courses for new music in Darmstadt . He worked in the Siemens studio for electronic music in Munich and was composer in residence in Berlin . By founding the Music Biennale in Zagreb in 1959, he became the founder of new music in Croatia. The founding of this festival already attracted international attention. With the support of Yekaterina Alexejewna Furzewa , he won the Bolshoi Ballet . The American State Department arranged for him a ballet from San Francisco , which danced to music by John Cage , among others . Finally, the Hamburg State Opera came with two planes to perform Lulu and Wozzeck .

“It was a couple of hundred thousand dollars with all the trips, and I got it all for free. And that won everything. I had the Russians, now the Americans, and with these cornerstones I got everything else I wanted, too [...] And when, after the first Zagreb Music Biennale, a huge article appeared in the New York Times with that Title Revolution in Zagreb , the ambassador in Washington asked me how did you do it, we sometimes pay ten thousand dollars just to have three or four sentences about Yugoslavia in the New York Times , and now we have almost half a page! "

- Milko Kelemen

Kelemen often changed countries, cities and apartments. From 1970 to 1973 he was a professor at the Robert Schumann Institute in Düsseldorf. In 1973 he accepted the position as professor for composition at the State University for Music and Performing Arts Stuttgart. There he was the successor to Henk Badings' chair . Since then he has lived in Stuttgart. In 1989 he retired.

Kelemen's students included Oskar Gottlieb Blarr , Adriana Hölszky , Dirk Reith , Giovanni Sollima , Mia Schmidt and Nebojša Jovan Živković .

plant

World premiere Concerto 2000, Stuttgart 2009

Kelemen composed electronic music , chamber music and operas as well as other large-scale works for choir and orchestra. He was primarily concerned with imitation and narration and less with aestheticizing the sounds used to create musical material. Kelemen's main works are the opera “Apocalyptica” and the oratorio “Salut au monde”. In 1953 he made the decision to set a text by Walt Whitman as an oratorio. When he implemented this in the 1990s, he was concerned with “a new synthesis of everything that has been musically developed in the last 50 years”.

An important principle of his work was the endeavor to make the complexity of new music more transparent. He formulated his creative attitude in the book Klangwelten :

"The norm of my value judgments is based on the assumption that the influence of the archetypes - or the effect of the chord of the impressive - from the imagination to form, language and structure is retained in music ."

- Milko Kelemen

The philosophical and psychological basis for the work of Kelemen was the work of CG Jung . A new type of design of musical material can be achieved with musical archetypes that do not necessarily have to be subject to the diction of complicated composition techniques. Kelemen refused to make novelty an end in itself. Rather, he advocated a new, post-modern simplicity using onomatopoesis : the overall musical structure is no longer artificially constructed in order to achieve a mutual logical relationship between the individual parts. For this a new quality of its own was achieved by tracing extra-musical sounds onomatopoeically. Kelemen was the author of the books “Sound Labyrinths”, “Sound Worlds” and “Writing to Stravinsky ”.

Awards

Works

Cast sheet for the world premiere of the opera "The State of Siege"
  • Der Spiegel , Ballet, 1959–1960
  • The new tenant musical scene, 1962; Performed in Münster in 1964; as Novi stanar in Zagreb in 1965
  • Bandonata , ballet with chants, 1964
  • The State of Siege , Opera, 1966–1969; 1970 at the Hamburg State Opera; as Opsadno stanje 1971 in Zagreb
  • Apocalyptica. Opera bestial or “Vom Anfang und Ende” or “Das Buch der Bücher” , multimedia ballet opera, 1973–1978; performed in 1979 in Graz; completely 1982 in Dresden (with Arila Siegert and Gerald Binke )
  • Salut au Monde for speakers, vocal soloists, choir (24 voices), large orchestra and light actions (idea 1953, composition 1996).
  • Dom Bernarde Albe , ballet (1998; performed in Zagreb in 1999)
  • Concerto 2000 for soprano, alto, tenor, bass, boy's voice and orchestra, based on a text by Walt Whitman; World premiere in 2009 in Stuttgart

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Fred K. Prieberg: In Search of Security. Milko Kelemen or: Where do you actually belong? In: The time . April 5, 1974. Retrieved September 29, 2018 .
  2. ↑ Alen Legovi in ​​the preface to Milko Kelemen's book Writing to Stravinsky. Limes, 2001
  3. ↑ Milko Kelemen, quotation in Hartmut Krones (ed.): Multicultural and international concepts in new music. Böhlau, Vienna 2008, p. 473 f.
  4. ↑ Beate Kutschke: Wild Thinking in New Music. 2002, p. 250
  5. ↑ Milko Kelemen: Sound Worlds. F. Noetzel, 1997, p. 231
  6. ↑ Beate Kutschke: Wild Thinking in New Music. 2002, p. 270
  7. ↑ Milko Kelemen: sound labyrinths. Piper, Munich 1981
  8. ↑ Milko Kelemen: Sound Worlds. Noetzel, Wilhelmshaven 1997
  9. ↑ Milko Kelemen: Letter to Stravinsky. Kalke, Stuttgart 2001
  10. ↑ Carl Dahlhaus u. a. (Ed.): Piper's Encyclopedia of Music Theater. Opera, operetta, musical, ballet , vol. 6. Piper, Munich 1997, p. 649 f.

literature

  • Beate Kutschke: Wild thinking in new music . Königshausen and Neumann, Würzburg 2002, ISBN 3-8260-2243-2 .

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Kelemen, Milko
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Yugoslav or Croatian composer
DATE OF BIRTH March 30, 1924
PLACE OF BIRTH Slatina
DATE OF DEATH March 8, 2018
Place of death Stuttgart