Uploaded July 2010 | Updated September 2026, 3 days ago
Prix du jury au concours international de composition Karlheinz Stockhausen à Bergame.
PHILIPPE FENELON : Compositeur français né à Suèvres (Loir-et-Cher) en 1952. Après ses premières études musicales au conservatoire d'Orléans, il entre au Conservatoire national supérieur de musique de Paris, dans la classe de composition d'Olivier Messiaen, où il obtient un premier prix en 1977, et parallèlement à l'Ecole nationale des langues orientales vivantes. Titulaire du Prix du jury au concours Stockhausen de Bergame, en 1980, il est nommé pensionnaire de la Casa Vélazquez à Madrid de 1981 à 1983.
Lauréat de nombreux prix internationaux - prix Georges Wildenstein en 1983, prix Hervé Dugardin en 1984, prix Villa Medicis hors les murs en 1991 - il est compositeur invité par le DAAD à Berlin en 1988, puis boursier de la fondation Beaumarchais en 1990, pour son troisième opéra, Salammbô, d'après Gustave Flaubert, qu'il compose en collaboration avec le poète J. Y. Masson et le metteur en scène Harry Kupfer (création prévue pour la saison 1997-1998 à l'Opéra de Paris-Bastille).
Commandes de l'Etat, du ministère de la Culture, de l'Ensemble Intercontemporain, de Radio-France, du Théâtre du Châtelet, du festival de Brême ou du Festival d'automne à Paris, ses oeuvres, parmi lesquelles Du, meine Welt ! (1979), Saturne (1987-1988), le cycle des Mythologies, ont été interprétées en Europe et aux Etats-Unis, notamment par l'Ensemble Intercontemporain qui crée Latitudes en 1981, Diagonal en 1983, les Onze Inventions en 1988, Orion (Mythologie II) en 1990, Omaggio (a Tiepolo) en 1991, l'opéra Le Chevalier imaginaire en 1992 et Midtown en 1994.
Prix du jury au concours international de composition Karlheinz Stockhausen à Bergame.
PHILIPPE FENELON : Compositeur français né à Suèvres (Loir-et-Cher) en 1952. Après ses premières études musicales au conservatoire d'Orléans, il entre au Conservatoire national supérieur de musique de Paris, dans la classe de composition d'Olivier Messiaen, où il obtient un premier prix en 1977, et parallèlement à l'Ecole nationale des langues orientales vivantes. Titulaire du Prix du jury au concours Stockhausen de Bergame, en 1980, il est nommé pensionnaire de la Casa Vélazquez à Madrid de 1981 à 1983.
Lauréat de nombreux prix internationaux - prix Georges Wildenstein en 1983, prix Hervé Dugardin en 1984, prix Villa Medicis hors les murs en 1991 - il est compositeur invité par le DAAD à Berlin en 1988, puis boursier de la fondation Beaumarchais en 1990, pour son troisième opéra, Salammbô, d'après Gustave Flaubert, qu'il compose en collaboration avec le poète J. Y. Masson et le metteur en scène Harry Kupfer (création prévue pour la saison 1997-1998 à l'Opéra de Paris-Bastille).
Commandes de l'Etat, du ministère de la Culture, de l'Ensemble Intercontemporain, de Radio-France, du Théâtre du Châtelet, du festival de Brême ou du Festival d'automne à Paris, ses oeuvres, parmi lesquelles Du, meine Welt ! (1979), Saturne (1987-1988), le cycle des Mythologies, ont été interprétées en Europe et aux Etats-Unis, notamment par l'Ensemble Intercontemporain qui crée Latitudes en 1981, Diagonal en 1983, les Onze Inventions en 1988, Orion (Mythologie II) en 1990, Omaggio (a Tiepolo) en 1991, l'opéra Le Chevalier imaginaire en 1992 et Midtown en 1994.


![Ernst Krenek, Drei Lieder op. 216
In the fall of 1972 Krenek wrote three Songs for Soprano and Piano op. 216, with lyrics by the Tylroean poet Lilly von Sauter. Krenek gently and discretely translates her images into flexible, transparent sound. The second poem (whose interior rhymes resemble the verses on peasant calendars) and the third text (with its explanatio of the nights astronomy) find their equivlent in the musics relaxed, clear part writing that nevertheless owes its simplicity to the multi-layered calculation. Due to the seemingly fleeting, but actually very elaborate mosaic-like way of composing, the vaguely remembered sounds of coherent motives dervied from tonal triades and dense twelve-tone figures never seem to take too much effort. Their search for the inexpressible is expressed insound at the threshhold of silence that circles through fields of silence.
Krenek was born in Vienna as the son of a Czech soldier in the Austro-Hungarian army. Throughout his life, however, he insisted that his name be written Krenek rather than his fathers Křenek, and that it should be pronounced as a German word. He studied there and in Berlin with Franz Schreker before working in a number of German opera houses as conductor. During World War I, Krenek was drafted into the Austrian army, but he was stationed in Vienna, allowing him to go on with his musical studies. In 1922 he met Alma Mahler, wife of the late Gustav Mahler, and her daughter, Anna, whom he married in March 1924. That marriage ended in divorce before its first anniversary.
At the time of his marriage to Anna Mahler, Krenek was completing his Violin Concerto No. 1, Op. 29. The Australian violinist Alma Moodie assisted Krenek, not with the scoring of the violin part, but with getting financial assistance from her Swiss patron Werner Reinhart at a time when there was hyper-inflation in Germany. In gratitude, Krenek dedicated the concerto to Moodie, and she premiered it on 5 January 1925, in Dessau. Kreneks divorce from Anna Mahler became final a few days after the premiere. Krenek did not attend the premiere, but he did have an affair with Moodie, which has been described as short-lived and complicated. He never managed to hear her play the concerto, but he did immortalize some aspects of her personality in the character of Anita in his opera Jonny spielt auf. In 1924, Krenek also dedicated his Sonata for Solo Violin, Op. 33 to Alma Moodie, and his Kleine Suite, Op. 28 (1924) to Reinhart.
His journalism was banned and his music was targeted in Germany by the Nazi Party beginning in 1933. On March 6, one day after elections in which the Nazis gained control of the Reichstag, Kreneks incidental music to Goethes Triumph der Empfindsamkeit was withdrawn in Mannheim, and eventually pressure was brought to bear on the Vienna State Opera, which cancelled the commissioned premiere of Karl V. The jazz imitations of Jonny spielt auf were included in the 1938 Degenerate art exhibition in Munich. Nonetheless, despite protests by conservatives and the fledgling Nazi party, that work was a great success in Kreneks lifetime, playing all over Europe and becoming so popular that even a brand of cigarettes, still on the market today in Austria, was named Jonny.
In 1938 Krenek moved to the United States of America, where he taught music at various universities, the first being Bassar College. He later taught at other institutions including Hamline University in Saint Paul, Minnesota from 1942-1947. There he met and married his third wife, his student and composer Gladys Nordenstrom. He became an American citizen in 1945. He later moved to Toronto, Canada where he taught at The Royal Conservatory of Music during the 1950s. His students included Milton Barnes, Lorne Betts, Samuel Dolin, Robert Erickson, Halim El-Dabh, Richard Maxfield, Will Ogdon, and George Perle. He died in Palm Springs, California. In 1998 Gladys Nordenstrom founded the Ernst Krenek Institute and in 2004 the private foundation Krems die Ernst Krenek in Vienna, Austria.
Krenek abandoned the neoromantic style in the late 1920s to embrace Arnold Schoenbergs twelve-tone technique,[8] the method exclusively employed in Kreneks opera Karl V (1931 33) and most of his later pieces. His most uncompromising use of the twelve-tone technique was in his Sixth String Quartet (1936) and his Piano Variations (1937). In the Lamentatio Jeremiae prophetae (1941 42) Krenek combined twelve-tone writing with techniques of modal counterpoint of the Middle Ages. Ernst Krenek, Drei Lieder op. 216](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/Mq4xAbU3Kio/mqdefault.jpg)



![Ralph Shapey, Songs of Life (Lisa Saffer, soprano; Joel Krosnick, Gilbert Kallish)
Great, real earnest, mystical dream - Glorious, sensual, sublime, madness, Art - Colour, warmth, light radiance: Man and Woman is Life. Life is man and woman - Man, Woman - Eternity.
[A] radical traditionalist is what Ive been called. My music combines two fundamentally contradictory impulses radical language and romantic sensibility. The melodies are disjunct and dissonant; they contain atonal harmonies and extremes in register, dynamics, and textural contrast. Yet the musical structures are grandly formed and run the gamut of dramatic gestures. Like the Romantics, I conceive of art in a deeply spiritual way. A great work of art transcends the immediate moment into a world of infinity.
My credo is: 1) The music must speak for itself. 2) Great art is a miracle. 3) What the mind can conceive will be done.
Ralph Shapey (Philadelphia, March 12, 1921 Chicago, June 13, 2002) was an American composer and conductor. He is well-known for his work as a composition professor at the University of Chicago, where he founded and directed the Contemporary Chamber Players. Shapey was a MacArthur Fellow in 1982.
Although Shapeys style is characterized by angularity, irony, and technical rigor, it eschews the pointillism, anti-emotionalism, and detached austerity of much twelve-tone music. His works insistence instead on sweeping gesture, frenetic passion, rhythmic vitality, lyrical melody, and dramatic arc recall Romanticism. Shapey was dubbed by critics Leonard Meyer and Bernard Jacobson as a radical traditionalist, which pleased him immensely he held a deep respect for the masters of the past, whom he regarded as his finest teachers.
The French-American composer Edgard Varèse was among Shapeys most important influences. Both composers shared a fascination with unusual sonorities, counterpoint masses, and the outer extremes of pitch space. The coordination of static sound blocks in Shapeys music also reminds one of another great French composer, Olivier Messiaen, though Shapey reportedly found Messiaens music saccharine and maudlin. Shapey also studied with Stefan Wolpe.
Although comparisons are useful, Shapeys compositional voice is undoubtedly personal and distinctive. Many listeners would call his music atonal, but Shapey himself denied the label. He considered himself a tonal composer, and indeed his work, though couched in a highly dissonant harmonic idiom rich in interval classes 1 and 6, does adhere to certain organizational features of tonal music, including pitch hierarchy and object permanence.
In 1992 the Pulitzer Prize for Music jury, which that year consisted of George Perle, Roger Reynolds, and Harvey Sollberger, selected Shapeys Concerto Fantastique for the award. However, the Pulitzer Board rejected that decision and choose to give the prize to the jurys second choice, Wayne Peterson. The music jury responded with a public statement stating that they had not been consulted in that decision and that the Board was not professionally qualified to make such a decision. The Board responded that the Pulitzers are enhanced by having, in addition to the professionals point of view, the laymans or consumers point of view, and they did not rescind their decision.
It is Art that makes Life . . . Henry James Ralph Shapey, Songs of Life (Lisa Saffer, soprano; Joel Krosnick, Gilbert Kallish)](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/NtVbspBSArY/mqdefault.jpg)



