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The quiet music of Alois Pinos.

Article Excerpt
Alois S. Pinos (*1925) is a professor at the Music Faculty of the Janacek Academy of Performing Arts in Brno and one of the key figures in Czech music since 1960, both in composition and theory, and in teaching. The defining features of his personality are a positive outlook on the world, humour and vitality, a continuing taste for discovering new things, the ability to share them with others and an energetic commitment to his work that many two generations younger might envy. He is among those Czech composers who have been strongly influenced by the second avant garde but do not reject or deny roots leading back to Janacek or Bartok. He has composed both symphonic and chamber music, and his electronic and electro-acoustic work has also attracted attention. His works have been played in concerts all over the world and have been broadcast by major stations. He has won the Classic Prize for composition twice. Pinos's contributions to music theory lie mostly in the generalisation of his own techniques as a compo ser. His work in this context includes exploration of the possibilities of interval orders and tone groups (Pinos, A.: Tonove skupiny, Panton 1971, Pinos, A.: Tone Groups, JAMU 2002), the creation of a series of pieces using general principles of composition and the specifics of team compositions. In the 1960s he himself led a team of composers and today -- together with Milos Stedron and Ivo Medek -- he is a member of another composing team, with which he has written two chamber orchestras and a symphony. Pinos's lectures and publications are also important. Since 1984 he has been a permanent lecturer at the international courses in Darmstadt and has presented papers at dozens of conferences throughout Europe. In addition to the books mentioned above, he has been publishing regularly in the specialist journals for more than forty years. His teaching, as well, deserves recognition since he has been teaching without a break at the Janacek cademy for more than fifty years. Thanks to his contacts with trends in composition in Europe as a whole, and to his personal courage, even in the times of the repressive communist ideology of art in the Seventies and Eighties he always taught in the spirit of contemporary music throughout the world. His reputation drew many students from Slovakia and Prague.

This year Pinos was awarded the City of Brno Prize for Lifelong Achievement. We used the opportunity to ask him a few questions.

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