YOUNG / KOMOROUS

Every month we are inviting you to a cycle of sessions named COOKING MUSIC / CONFRONTATION. You can look forward to a series of listening shows based on the confrontation of the New York and Czech music scene in contemporary contexts.

Victor Young (U.S.)

American composer, arranger, violinist and conductor. Born in Chicago in 1900, the young Victor began playing violin at the age of six, and was sent to Poland when he was ten to stay with his grandfather and study at Warsaw Imperial Conservatory. In the mid-1930s he moved to Hollywood where he concentrated on films, recordings of light music and providing backing for popular singers, including Bing Crosby. He received 22 Academy Award nominations for his work in film but he did not win during his lifetime. He received his only Oscar posthumously for his score of Around the World in Eighty Days (1956).

Rudolf Komorous (CZ)

Born in Prague in 1931, he is a Czech bassoonist and composer living in Canada. He studied bassoon (with Karel Pivoňka) at the Prague Conservatory of Music. In 1959 he took part in electronic music courses in Warsaw, Poland. At the beginning of the 1960s, he was a co-founder (and bassoonist from 1961-68) of Musica Viva Pragensis, an ensemble that specialized in the performance of new music. Mr. Komorous immigrated to Canada in 1969 and became a professor of composition and music theory at the University of Victoria.

The event will be hosted by Viktor Pantůček, a scientist at the Institute of Musicology at FFMU, a playwright of a number of international music festivals, such as the Brno Contemporary orchestra.