Leon Milo
Leon Milo (born December 10, 1956 in Los Angeles , † August 31, 2014 in Paris ) was an American composer , percussionist and sound artist .
His works and soundscapes draw on a broad spectrum of instrumental, electronic, natural and synthetic sounds.
Life
Early years
Milo grew up in the Hollywood Hills (Los Angeles) and was in contact with the most important musicians on the west coast. As a teenager he was a student of well-known drummers Bill Douglass , Charles Flores and Joe Porcaro . From the age of 15 he received lessons in timpani and orchestral percussion from William Kraft . Kraft introduced him to the classical orchestral repertoire and contemporary music. Milo later studied with Kraft's teacher Saul Goodman at the Juilliard School in New York.
new York
In 1975, Milo was accepted into the Juilliard School in New York to study timpani and percussion with Saul Goodman and Elden C. “Buster” Bailey. At the same time he took the subjects composition and contemporary music analysis with Stanley Wolfe, who supported him in composing his first pieces. Between 1975 and 1981 he played in numerous orchestras and ensembles at the Juilliard School and as a freelance percussionist in New York and the surrounding area. During this time he was also a timpanist and percussionist in the Greenwich Symphony Orchestra.
At the Julliard School he worked with conductors such as Sixten Ehrling , Leonard Bernstein , Georg Solti , Herbert von Karajan , Pierre Boulez and Myung-Whun Chung . Milo also performed in places like The Kitchen to perform early minimal music as well as improvised and aleatoric new music. He attended workshops at Merce Cunningham's dance studio and was inspired by the ideas of Cunningham and John Cage . In 1980 Milo obtained a Master of Music from the Juilliard School.
Israel
1981 he was the Israel Sinfonietta Orchestra in Be'er Sheva offered the position of first Pauker and percussionists. Between 1981 and 1984 he worked there with such well-known conductors as Mendi Rodan , Jean-Pierre Rampal , Paul Tortelier , Zubin Mehta , Isaac Stern and Karsten Andersen . During this time he was a student of the composer Tzvi Avni . Avni composed the solo percussion work “5 Variations for Mister K.” for a concert by Milo at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art in 1983. Milo has performed in hundreds of concerts with the Israel Sinfonietta Orchestra, the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra and the Tel-Aviv Chamber Orchestra. He has appeared both as a solo artist and in ensembles at the Israel Festival and the Tel Aviv Museum Concert Series.
In 1984 he sent his compositions to the Italian composer Luciano Berio , who at the time was already well known for his experimental work and is considered a pioneer of electronic music . Berio invited him to Florence and introduced Leon Milo to Leonard Stein in Los Angeles .
los Angeles
In the summer of 1984, Milo returned to Los Angeles to work with Leonard Stein . Until 1989 he was a private student with Stein. Stein was Arnold Schoenberg's assistant in the 1940s. He was an important interpreter of Schoenberg's compositions and director of the Schoenberg Institute (at USC ). As a professor, Leonard Stein supported generations of composers in developing their own ideas. Among many other students, La Monte Young is particularly worth mentioning here.
A year later (1985) Milo was accepted into the composition workshop at the Aspen Music Festival . His teachers there were Luciano Berio, Jacob Druckman , Earle Brown and Morton Subotnick . Milo became increasingly part of the Los Angeles music scene. Initially within the Independent Composers Association, for which he wrote the works “Antiphon” and “Hei-Kyo-Ku” . He played regularly for the Santa Barbara Symphony, the Ventura Symphony Orchestra, and The San Bernardino Symphony.
With the ensemble “XTET”, which he co-founded, he often appeared at the Monday Evening Concerts. In 1986, after only two years studying with Leonard Stein, he was selected by John Harbison , the former composer in residence of the LA Philharmonic commissioned to write a work for the new music ensemble of the LA Philharmonic. In 1987, Milo was accepted as a participant in the Sundance Institute Composer's Lab .
Paris
A Fulbright Fellowship for composition took Milo to Paris in 1989. That year he took private lessons from the French composer Gilbert Amy (who was a student of Darius Milhaud and Olivier Messiaen, among others ) and attended master classes from Tristan Murail and Betsy Jolas at the American School in Fontainebleau.
In 1990 he received the Nadia and Lili Boulanger Composition Fellowship and wrote Quintrillium , a work for symphony orchestra for the Ventura County Symphony Orchestra. The piece was commissioned for Leonard Stein and Betty Freeman . The world premiere was conducted by Leonard Stein. Also on the program was Arnold Schoenberg's Violin Concerto (Op. 36), played by Rose Mary Harbison (wife of the composer John Harbison).
In the mid-1990s, Milo began to work with computer-aided composition methods, while he continued to study electronic music with Curtis Roads and Gérard Pape in the UPIC (now CCMIX) studios. During this time he wrote his first electronic piece TimeTexture . Milo has had a long artistic partnership with designer and artist Arik Levy . This began in 1995 with the assignment to develop the music and sound design for some of Levy's films. Various joint works followed such as B. Levy's Pompidou Art Center Installation, Love Counts and Osmosis for the SWAROVSKI CRYSTAL PALACE in Milan .
In 1998 he was accepted into the composition course of the IRCAM Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique / Musique (German: Research Institute for Acoustics / Music). It is located in the Center Pompidou in Paris and was co-founded and influenced by the composer Pierre Boulez . In 2002, Leon Milo composed the piece Mexico for the Trio d'Argent and shortly afterwards began developing interactive programs for live performances. Together with Francois Daudin Clavaud, he created many interactive sequences for the Trio d'argent for a concert program called El Horizonte. In 2005 they played El Horizonte (here together with a tightrope walker) at the University of Mexico as part of the Musica Y Escena festival in Mexico City .
Milo and Clavaud later founded Interact-Son., A duo for flute and electronic music. Leon Milo has been composing music for European films and television formats since 1992. He has worked for channels such as Arte , France 2 , France 3, Canal + and many others. The 3D animated short film “The Last Minute” by Nicolas Salis , for which he did the music and the sound design, deserves special mention . The film was part of the official selection at the Cannes Film Festival in 2004 and received the award for best music and best sound design at the European Short Film Festival FEC Reus in 2005.
Recent works and projects
In 2005 Milo was commissioned by the Ile de France Festival and the Trio d'Argent to write a piece for three flutes, three percussionists and live electronics. The new work “TranseSept” was financed by a SACEM award and premiered in Paris. 2006 Milo was Artist in Residence at the United Sardine Factory in Bergen, Norway.
In 2007 he was a soloist at the Borealis Contemporary Music Festival, an internationally important festival for contemporary and experimental music in Norway , which was founded in 2004. His compositional contribution consisted of an 8-hour electronic improvisation. In 2007 he founded the duo "PIANOWAVES" with the pianist Susanne Kessel . The duo played pieces for piano, electronics and percussion. They played their first appearances at the international Beethoven Festival in Bonn that year. Leon Milos' transcription for piano and electronics of the song I Miss You by Björk was recorded by Susanne Kessel and published in 2007 on her solo CD ICELAND. Kessel and Milo also worked with other artists, such as B. the American saxophonist Demetrius Spaneas.
In 2008 they performed together in the chamber music hall of the Beethoven House, a concert hall next to the house where Ludwig van Beethoven was born . On the occasion of the 100th birthday of the French composer Olivier Messiaen , Susanne Kessel developed a program in 2008 that she and Milo performed together as “PIANOWAVES” at the international Beethoven Festival. For this he composed a total of five soundscapes. These were based on the various parameters of Messian's music such as: B. Nature, Christian faith, bird calls, exotic rhythms and improvisation.
It is worth noting that Milo returned to the Aspen Music Festival in 2008, where he had attended a prestigious composition workshop 23 years earlier. This time, however, he was hired as the musical advisor for Medici Arts' live streaming on medici.tv. In September 2009 Milo and Francois Daudin Clavaud played their interactive live performance “Sound Gardens” at various locations in Mexico as a duo Interact-Son. The most important concerts were at the Musica Y Escena Festival in Mexico City and the Mediarte / Arte y Nuevas Tecnologías Festival in Monterrey. The interactive video that was part of the performance was created especially for this purpose by the video artist Miguel Chevalier .
He composed the music for two documentary films with the economist and Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz “Where Is the World Going, Mr. Stiglitz?” (2007) and “Around the World with Joseph Stiglitz: Perils and Promises of Globalization” (2009, original title: “Le monde selon Stiglitz”) for Arte. Jacques Sarasin always directed .
In 2009 his duo partner Susanne Kessel commissioned 12 international composers (on the occasion of Schumann's 200th birthday) to write new works for their CD project “An Robert Schumann”. Based on the 5th Fantasia of the Kreisleriana op. 16 , Milo composed his “Fantasie Electroacoustique for RS and SK” for Susanne Kessel. The CD was released by the Cologne label Obst. Other composers are Alex Shapiro , Alvin Lucier , Michael Denhoff , Ulrike Haage , Christoph Israel , Moritz Eggert , Ivan Sokolov , Mike Lang, Torben Maiwald, Manfred Niehaus . In 2010 he played with Interact-Son at the invitation of the Fondation Alliance Française in Angola , Africa. In 2011 he played with Interact-Son on behalf of Le Groupe de Recherches Musicales at the 7th Festival Présence Électronique. In 2012 Milo wrote the music for the ten-part fictional novella Pedro Páramo produced by Radio France .
death
Leon Milo died on August 31, 2014 at the age of 57 from cancer in a Paris hospice. He was buried on September 11, 2014 with great public sympathy in the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris (Division 62, 3d / 61, 5th / 66). During the funeral, Milo's pieces such as B. "Gongscape" performed by long-time companions such as the Trio d'Argent and Susanne Kessel. As already mentioned, Milo was a founding member of the chamber music ensemble Xtet in the 1980s. With the news of his imminent death, the other musicians organized a reunion of all former members and performed the improvised piece “Bells for Leon” in his honor one day after his death . The improvisation can be found as a video on Youtube.
Works
- Shinui - For Marimba (1985), premiered at Los Angeles Harbor College, USA
- Trio - for clarinet, violin and cello (1986)
- Antiphon - For two flutes, clarinet, bass clarinet, string quartet and piano (1986), premiered at Los Angeles Harbor College, conducted by Lucas Richman, commissioned by the Independent Composers Association
- Hei-Kyo-Ku - For soprano and 18 instruments (1987), premiered by the USC New Music Ensemble, conducted by Donald Crockett, commissioned by the Independent Composers Association, Los Angeles. (It was originally written for a Japanese-American theater where it was performed in 1987)
- Verset - For 10 Instruments (1988), premiered by the Los Angeles Philharmonic New Music Ensemble, conducted by David Alan Miller, commissioned by John and Rose Mary Harbison
- Solo for Cello (1990) , premiered by Vincent Segal at the US Embassy in Paris
- Quintrillium - For Symphony Orchestra (1991), premiered by the Ventura County Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Leonard Stein, commissioned by Leonard Stein and Betty Freeman
- TimeTexture - For piano and electronics (1997), first performed in 1997 as part of the Los Angeles Piano Spheres by Gloria Cheng, piano, commissioned for the Los Angeles Piano Spheres by Leonard Stein and Betty Freeman, 2013 on the CD “... á Olivier Messiaen ”published by Susanne Kessel
- Sa! - For violin solo and electronics (1999), premiered by Nicolas Miribel (violin) in the Auditorium St. Germain in Paris in 1999, presented by IRCAM
- Mexico - For flute trio and electronics (2002), premiered by Trio d'Argent at the 38th Festival Rugissants in Grenoble
- In The Air - For Electronics (2003), premiered at Gallery Sentou, Paris, on behalf of Arik Levy
- L'Amour en Cage - For cello, live electronics and tightrope walkers (2004), premiered at Carré Magique in Lannion, France
- TranseSept - For three flutes, three drums and live electronics (2005), premiered in Vincennes, near Paris, by the Trio d'Argent (Paris) and the Trio Sete Portas (Salvador de Bahia) as part of the Festival Ile de France, im Order from SACEM
- Stellar Blue - For piano and electronics (2006), premiered in 2006 by Susanne Kessel in the Beethoven House in Bonn
- Résonances - For Electronics (2006), premiered in Enghien les Bains, commissioned by Arik Levy
- I Miss You - arrangement for piano and electronics , Björk / Milo (2007), commissioned by Susanne Kessel, published in 2007 on the CD "ICELAND" by Susanne Kessel
- Birdscape - For recorded sounds and electronics (2008), premiered by PIANOWAVES with pianist Susanne Kessel at the Beethovenfest in Bonn, published in 2013 on the CD "... á Olivier Messiaen" by Susanne Kessel
- Pariscape - For recorded sounds and electronics (2008), premiered by PIANOWAVES with Susanne Kessel at the Beethovenfest in Bonn, published in 2013 on the CD "... á Olivier Messiaen" by Susanne Kessel
- Voicescape - For Electronics (2008), premiered by PIANOWAVES with Susanne Kessel at the Beethovenfest in Bonn, published in 2013 on the CD "... á Olivier Messiaen" by Susanne Kessel
- Sound Gardens - For flute, live electronics and interactive video (2009), premiered at the Musica Y Escena Festival in Mexico, in collaboration with Francois Daudin Clavaud, interactive video by Miguel Chevalier.
- Fantasie Electro-Acoustique for RS & SK - For sampled piano solo and electronics (2010), commissioned by Susanne Kessel, published in 2010 on the CD "An Robert Schumann" by Susanne Kessel
- Huiteme Porte - For flute trio and live electronics (2012) premiered by Leon Milo at the Detours de Babel Festival in Grenoble
- Régards - For Live Electronics (2012), premiered by Leon Milo in 2012 on Radio France
Sound installations
- Collaboration with Arik Levy, designer, for the Swarovski Crystal Palace, Milan (2009) and the Slott Gallery, Paris (2010)
- Center Des Arts, (with Arik Levy, Designer) Enghein (2007)
- Borealis Festival, Bergen (2007)
- Jardin de Luxembourg (2007)
- «ArtSenat» with Florence Bost, designer, Paris (2007)
- Center Pompidou Paris (2005)
- Video et design sonore, with Nataliya Lyakh, photographer, Fiac Paris (2004)
- Gallery Sentou, with Arik Levy, Designer, Paris (2002)
- La Maison Saint Victoire multimedia presentation, Aix en Provence, France (1996)
- Le Musée Archéologique de Saint Romain en Gal, Audioguidage Vienne, France (1994)
- Interact-Sound Duo concert with Francois Daudin Clavaud at the Musica y Escena Festival, Mexico City (2009)
Artistic Director
- Musical advisor for the live streaming of Medici Arts and Ideale Audience at the Aspen Music Festival (2008)
Web links
- Leon Milo - official website
- Leon Milo in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- Milo's works at soundcloud
- Pianowaves - official website
- Website of his duo partner Susanne Kessel
- TV documentary with music by Milo (video)
- Profile at Beethovenfest.de
Individual evidence
- ^ [1] Leon Milo in the Sundance Institute Composers Lab Archives
- ^ [2] Video - Concert Spectacle "El Horizonte" du Trio d'Argent
- ↑ Archived copy ( memento of the original dated June 6, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Interact-Son - Official Website
- ↑ [3] “The Last Minute” by Nicolas Salis on imdb.com
- ↑ Archived copy ( memento of the original from January 20, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Best music and sound Award 2005 at the FEC Reus Short Film Festival
- ↑ [4] Information on the premiere of "TranseSept"
- ↑ Archived copy ( memento of the original from August 10, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. United Sardine Factory, Norway - Artist list
- ↑ Archived copy ( memento of the original from March 9, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Festival Mediarte / Arte y Nuevas Tecnologías - official website
- ↑ [5] Music for "Pedro Páramo" on Leon Milo's website
- ^ "Composer Leon Milo dead". In: General-Anzeiger Bonn. Volume 124, September 2, 2014, page 11.
- ↑ [6] Ensemble Xtet plays the piece "Bells for Leon" in memory of Leon Milo (on Youtube)
- ↑ [7] Commissions from Betty Freeman in the Online Archive of California (Box 21, Folder 22, Oversize FB-220-04)
- ↑ [8] TimeTexture in the list of works commissioned by Betty Freeman
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Milo, Leon |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American composer, percussionist and sound artist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | December 10, 1956 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Los Angeles , United States of America |
| DATE OF DEATH | August 31, 2014 |
| Place of death | Paris , France |