Yehoshua Lakner

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Yehoshua Lakner ( Hebrew יהושוע לקנר; German Yehoshua Lakner ; * April 24, 1924 in Bratislava ; † December 5, 2003 in Zurich ) was an Israeli-Swiss composer .

Life

Lakner grew up in Bratislava and emigrated to Palestine in 1941 . From 1943 to 1948 he studied with Ödön Pártos and Alexander Uriah Boskovitch, among others . In 1952 he undertook studies in the USA, so in Tanglewood with Aaron Copland . From 1950 to 1963 he worked as a teacher at the Rubin Academy of Music in Jerusalem. From 1959 he worked temporarily in the studio for electronic music of the Northwest German Radio in Cologne with Mauricio Kagel and Karlheinz Stockhausen . In 1963 Lakner moved to Switzerland. From 1974 to 1987 he was a theory teacher at the Conservatory and Music Academy in Zurich .

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From Lakner's earlier time there are instrumental and vocal works that move freely between the sometimes irreconcilable positions of the neoclassical and the serial . His Toccata for Orchestra (1958) received the Engel Prize of the City of Tel-Aviv. For the avant-garde theater performances of the 1960s in Maria von Ostfeldens Theater an der Winkelwiese in Zurich, he created a kind of musique concrète as abstract stage music from tape montages .

His compositional activity changed when he bought a Commodore 64 computer in the early 1980s. He began to experiment with algorithms that generated sounds from the loudspeaker and graphic elements on the screen at the same time. Undeterred by colleagues who smiled at him, he stayed with this device, which had quickly become a kind of historical musical instrument due to technological progress, and wrote his musical life's work in the BASIC programming language exclusively for the C64. - Sometimes these processes are precisely defined, sometimes they are influenced by the integrated random number generator or the keyboard.

With these graphic-musical pieces, which he called AVZGs (Audio-Visuelle Zeit-Gestalten), he played concerts and took part in exhibitions (London 1991, Tel Aviv 1993, Basel 1994, Zurich 1996). In 1999 his “Segante” project about the Swiss painter Giovanni Segantini was performed in Zurich, Milan and Bratislava.

A foundation has been dedicated to his work since his death.

Theater music

  • Theater an der Winkelwiese : Victor by Roger Vitrac, 1965; Eugène Ionesco's chairs , 1966; Nestroy-Quodlibet by Johann Nestroy, 1967; The Architect and Emperor of Assyria by Fernando Arrabal, 1968; The Night of the Murderers by Jose Triana, 1969; Jona by Martin Sorescu, 1970
  • Schauspielhaus Zürich : Turandot or The Congress of White Washers by Bertolt Brecht, 1969
  • Theater am Neumarkt : Garden of Earthly Delights by Fernando Arrabal, 1971

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