Petr Kotik
 | This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page. (Learn how and when to remove these template messages)
|
Petr Kotik (surname originally Kotík) (born January 27, 1942, in
Since 1983, Kotik has been living in New York City. Kotik is the founder and Artistic Director[1][2] of the S.E.M. Ensemble, based in New York City, which presents both chamber and orchestra concerts. Kotik has received numerous commissions and composition grants, from the National Endowment for the Arts. Kotik received a 1996 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award. He is also known for his realization of the complete musical works of Marcel Duchamp.
With the S.E.M. Ensemble (which he founded in 1970), Kotik has for many years actively promoted the work of other (mostly American) composers sharing a stylistic affinity with his own work, giving frequent performances as conductor and performer with the group as well as its larger version, the Orchestra of the S.E.M. Ensemble.
Kotik's music can be catagorized as
Among Kotik's best known works is the six-hour opera Many Many Women (1976–78), based on a text by Gertrude Stein, for whose work, appropriately, Kotik has a special affinity.
As a performer, Kotik has been an active chamber musician throughout much of his life. Kotik was not interested in orchestra until 1992, when he conducted Atlas Eclipticalis by John Cage with the 86-piece Orchestra of the S.E.M. Ensemble in Tribute to John Cage at Carnegie Hall. Since then, Kotik has been organizing large-scale events, expanding the S.E.M. Ensemble into The Orchestra of the S.E.M. Ensemble, and encouraging and commissioning other composers to write for orchestra. In 1999, after conducting Gruppen by Karlheinz Stockhausen, Kotik initiated a project of compositions for 3 orchestras and commissioned the creation of new 3-orchestra works by Alvin Lucier, Christian Wolff, Martin Smolka, Phill Niblock and Olga Neuwirth. In 2001, Kotik founded the biennial Ostrava Days, an Institute and Festival of New Music in Ostrava, Czech Republic. This three-week program, one of the largest in existence[citation needed], focuses on works for orchestra, with two resident orchestras and number of resident composers, chamber music groups and soloists.
Although Kotik entered the conservatory at the age of 14, he only began composing in his late teens. As a composer, Kotik is essentially self-taught, in spite of his education in Western composition fundamentals in Prague and Vienna. His technique has very little to do with commonly used compositional methods.
Among Kotik's best-known compositions are Music for 3 (1964) for piano and 2 strings; Spontano (1964) for piano and ensemble (composed for
"Kotik’s massive and too modestly named Fragment (1st movement of Music in Two Movements), which he conducted with his SEM Orchestra gives me sufficient pretext to voice the overdue sentiment that he is one of the best composers working today...among those writing abstract works for ensembles of unconventional instruments, Kotik stands very near the top and possibly at the top. He produced some of the most durable, though still little-known musical monuments of the post-Cage 70s, and his output has been amazingly consistent in quality.” (New York music critic and composer Kyle Gann, The Village Voice 1998).
Kotik's music is available on the Labor, Dog w/a Bone and Ear-Rational labels.
His father was the painter
References
- ^ Ross, Alex (1 November 1994). "Czechs Celebrate Traditions Of the Other Classical Crucible". New York Times. Retrieved 13 June 2010.
- ^ Lockwood, Alan (12 October 2009). "Sounds like now". Muso Magazine. Ostrava Center for New Music. Archived from the original on 14 September 2012. Retrieved 13 June 2010.
External links
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
| Artists | |
| Other | |
