Ilya Zeljenka

Ilya Zeljenka

Ilja Zeljenka (born December 21, 1932 in Bratislava ; † July 13, 2007 there ) was a Slovak composer .

Life

Zeljenka took private lessons in piano, harmony and counterpoint while at school. From 1951 to 1956 he studied with Ján Cikker at the Bratislava University of Music and Performing Arts in Bratislava. From 1957 to 1961 he worked as a dramaturge for the Slovak Philharmonic and from 1961 to 1968 as a producer and lecturer at the Czechoslovak Radio in Bratislava. At the end of the 1960s he took over the chairmanship of the Slovak Composers' Union, from which he was excluded for political reasons in 1972 and subsequently largely ignored as a composer.

In the early 1990s, Zeljenka became President of the Slovak Music Union and Director of Melos-Étos, an international festival for contemporary music in Bratislava. From 1985 to 1996 he taught at the Academy of Music in Bratislava, where Alexander Mihalič became his student.

plant

Stylistically based on Prokofiev , Bartók , Honegger and Stravinsky , serial techniques found their way into Zeljenka's extensive compositional work in the 1960s . He also used electronic sounds and was the first Slovak composer to use electroacoustic means in film music. As a result, he also experimented with quarter-tone music . From the 1970s onwards, he also took up influences from folk music and neo-romanticism.

Zeljenka wrote 2 operas, choral works (including a "Slovak Passion"), orchestral works (including 9 symphonies and solo concerts), piano and chamber music (including 14 string quartets, 25 piano sonatas) and numerous film scores.

literature

• The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd edition

Web links

• Information from the Music Center Slovakia (English)
• Ilja Zeljenka in the Internet Movie Database (English)