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The composer Rudolf Komorous.

Article Excerpt
In the 1960s the composer Rudolf Komorous shone as one of the most radical and interesting members of the avant-garde in Czechoslovakia. After 1968 like many others he seemed to vanish off the face of the earth--at least from Czechoslovak barbed-wire fenced in perspective. In 2005 he was 74 let, and celebrated his birthday in Victoria in Canada, near the shores of the Pacific Ocean, where he has lived and successfully worked since 1971.

He was born on the 8th of December 1931 in Prague in Zizkov, and his father, first clarinet in the National Theatre Orchestra, influenced his choice of career as professional musician. In the grade school at Amerling Teacher Training Institute he was in the same class as Prince Lobkowicz, whose chauffeur used to let him get out of the Rolls Royce a couple of streets away so he could walk to school with the other children. Rudolf became best friends with the Prince's desk-mate, Josef Podany the son of a tram driver. The small boys here were imbued with a thorough spirit of Masarykian democracy, learnt the importance of education and love of country, even if these ideas sound rather naive in our milieu.

He studied at a modern gymnasium (grammar school), and from the fifth form also studied bassoon at the Prague Conservatory on the wishes of his father (1946-52). Komorous left the conservatory to take up a place at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague (1952-59), continuing his bassoon studies, and then started to study composition in Pavel Borkovec's class.

In 1955 Komorous co-founded the art group known as the Smidrove (the others were the artists Bedrich Dlouhy, Jan Koblasa, Karel Nepras, and Jaroslav Vozniak). They declared their allegiance to an aesthetics of strangeness and played a very important role in the history of Czech art under communism. The Smidrs aesthetics, which despite a period favouring abstraction emphasised the importance of the concrete and had a somewhat Dada-esque ethos, was to have a fundamental influence on Rudolf Komorous's lifelong output.

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In 1957 Komorous won first prize in an international bassoon competition in Geneva (Concours International diExecution Musicale; it was the very first time a Czechoslovak had won such an award). As a result Komorous was able to go for two years at the Conservatory in Beijing in China (1959 - 1961), where he taught bassoon and chamber play. In 1961, after his return from China, Komorous accepted an invitation from the flautist and composer Petr Kotik,...

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