Miloslav Kabeláč


Miloslav Kabeláč was a prominent Czech composer and conductor. Miloslav Kabeláč belongs to the foremost Czech symphonists, whose work is sometimes compared with Antonín Dvořák's and Bohuslav Martinů's. In the communist period Kabeláč's work found itself on the periphery of official attention and was performed only sporadically and in a limited choice of compositions.

Life

Kabeláč was born in Prague. In 1928-31 he studied at the Prague Conservatory as a pupil of Karel Boleslav Jirák, simultaneously he was a pupil of Alois Hába. In 1932-54 Kabeláč was employed by Prague Radio. From 1957 to 1968 he worked as a teacher at the Prague Conservatory. During his life Kabeláč was active in Umělecká beseda, in the Federation of Czechoslovak Composers and other organisations.
In the 1960s he tried to revive contacts with Western modern music and composers, but after the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia he was silenced. His works were performed only abroad from then on.

Works

Miloslav Kabeláč belongs to the most distinguished Czech composers of the 20th century. He soon created a distinctive style for which the auspicious melody and harmony, the ingenious polyphony and the consistent architecture of both small and large compositions are typical. His utmost expression was his conscious work with the intervals in which he emerged from non-European musical cultures. Kabeláč used here, for example, artificially numbered scale - mods whose internal course has a larger range than an octave. He also denounced the term artificial tonal music, especially for the musical theoretical justification of his economical melody. In the interval structure, he also explored the possibilities of so-called interval augmentation and diminution, inversion and other practices brought to the music by the so-called 2nd Viennese school. The first mature compositions of this style include the anti-cantata Do not retreat!, performed for the first time after the end of the Second World War.
At the beginning and in the years of war, Kabeláč focused on chamber opuses and Symphonic. Over time, work with large occupation, which are his most significant works - along with songs for drums that have already come on European stages at the time. In the 1960s, which gave him wide recognition in the form of the State Prize and Foreign Orders, he received a number of stimuli from foreign avant-garde, which he had organically incorporated into his compositional morphology. He also excelled in pedagogical activities and interest in non-European cultures. He was one of the first promoters of electro-acoustic music in Czechoslovakia.
Numerous choreographers have also taken up his work "Eight Inventions for Percussion Instruments. ", Alvin Ailey with the American Dance Theater are the most prominent among them, his choreography titled Streams, was performed in Prague too in 1979.

Symphonies