Composer and conductor, born in Venice, NE Italy. A child prodigy violinist and conductor, he went on to study composition and conducting. Early in his musical career he composed for films and radio, and taught at the Venice Conservatory, then in 1955 he began to do research into the possibilities of electronic music, founding with Luciano Berio the Studio di Fonologia Musicale of Italian Radio. He became music director of Milan Radio, and wrote pieces for combinations of live and taped music, such as Compositions in Three Tempi, and a number of pieces for electronic music, such as Dimensions II (1960).
Bruno Maderna (April 21, 1920 - November 13, 1973) was an Italian-German orchestra director and 20th century music composer.
Biography
Maderna was born in Venice.
At the age of four he was taught violin in Chioggia, and his grandfather noticed the young boy was a genius;
He protracted his studies in Milan (1935), Venice (1939) and in Rome (1940), where he finally took his degree in composition and musicology at the "Santa Cecilia" Academy under the guide of Alessandro Bustini and Antonio Guarnieri.
During World War II he joined the army, the Partisan Resistance and he was also imprisoned in a concentration camp. here he met, among others, Boulez, Messiaen, Stockhausen, Cage, Pousseur and the most important players of the neue musik that inspired him to compose new pieces (for example he wrote Musica su due dimensioni for Severino Gazzelloni).
Maderna was an eclectic director, so he was able to switch between different musical styles: he directed Purcell's Dido and Aeneas, Wagner's Parsifal, many works by Debussy and Ravel, classical and romantic symphonies;
In 1957-58 he taught dodecaphonic technique at the Milan Conservatory;
He died in 1973 at Darmstadt, when he was working on Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande.
Works
Among the early works we find the Concerto per due pianoforti e strumenti (1947-1948) with Bartók influences and a special attitude towards difficult sonorities;
As mentioned before, the flutist Severino Gazzelloni inspired Maderna during the Darmstadt experience. In 1961 he composed Honeyreves for flute and piano: this piece was built on the complex flute melodies and on the strange piano sound effects (clusters, playing on the strings, etc.). In the Studio di Fonologia Musicale, with the help of the sound technician Marino Zuccheri, he wrote some of the most impressive electroacustic works of his time: Musica su due dimensioni (Music on two dimensions, 1958) for flute and magnetic tape, Notturno (1956) and Continuo (1958) both for magnetic tape.
Maderna's favorite solo instrument was the oboe: this was the perfect 'aulodic' media that he was searching in order to build the 'absolute melody' (Aulody is a word that mixes the Greek aulos (i.e. In 1962-63, he wrote the first concert for oboe (Konzert fur Oboe und Kammerensemble), in which he was influenced by serial composition; in 1967 he wrote the second Concerto per oboe, in 1973 he wrote the Terzo Concerto per Oboe.
One of his most famous works was Quadrivium for four percussionists and four orchestra's groups (played for the first time at the Royan Festival, in 1969). The aleatory technique is used also in Ausstrahlung for woman voice, flute and oboe obbligati, big orchestra and magnetic tape (Irradiation, 1971, a homage to Persian culture), in Serenata per un satellite for - ad libitum - violin, flute, oboe, clarinet, marimba, harp, guitar and mandolin (Serenata for a Satellite, 1969) and in Grande Aulodia for flute and oboe soli with orchestra (1970).
Bibliography
Massimo Mila, Maderna musicista europeo.
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