Petr Kotik
Encyclopedia
Petr Kotik (b. January 27, 1942 in Prague
) is a composer
, conductor and flutist living in New York City
. He was educated in Europe (Prague Conservatory
, graduated 1961; Vienna Music Academy, graduated 1966; AMU Prague, graduated 1969). From 1960 to 1963, Kotik studied composition privately with Jan Rychlík
in Prague, and from 1963 to 1966 at the Music Academy in Vienna with Karl Schieske, Hans Jelinek, and Friedrich Cerha
. In Prague, he founded and directed Musica Viva Pragensis (1961–64) and the QUAX Ensemble (1966–69). He came to the United States in 1969 at the invitation of Lukas Foss
and Lejaren Hiller
to join the Center for Creative and Performing Arts at the University at Buffalo
.
Since 1983, Kotik has been living in New York City. Kotik is the founder and Artistic Director 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
, among others, and in 1996, he received the prestigious composition award from Foundation for Contemporary Arts
. 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 is composed in the minimal
vein, with works often being of long duration and featuring slow tempi and quiet dynamics. Though his works feature innumerable gradual, slight changes, giving them a seemingly static quality, his harmonies, however, are more complex than those employed by many other American minimal composers, and his musical process
is not as apparent to the listener as, for example, in the works of Steve Reich
or Philip Glass
. Further, Kotik does not draw as heavily on jazz
or rock
in his works as do many of his American colleagues (though, like Steve Reich, he is quite interested in Medieval music
and often integrates Medieval compositional techniques into his works). These qualities set Kotik's music apart from American minimal trends, giving his music a decidedly European character more similar in outlook to, for example, that of Hungarian minimalists such as Zoltán Jeney
, László Sáry
, or László Vidovszky
.
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. Until 1992, Kotik did not have the slightest interest in orchestra. That changed in 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
, with David Tudor
as the soloist. 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, focuses on works for orchestra, with 2 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. This was due to his lack of interest in classical harmony, a tendency shared with other composers such as Christian Wolff and John Cage. As a composer, Kotik is essentially self-taught, in spite of his education in composition fundamentals in Prague and Vienna. His technique has very little to do with commonly-used compositional methods.
Kotik's compositional system can be compared to a game in which the use of controlled chance is balanced by conscious decision-making. The two alternate, one influencing the other. In this way Kotik triggers unpredictable processes while the work progresses in the envisioned direction. In recent years, Kotik has relied increasingly on intuitive gestures. The strategies and limitations Kotik imposes on chance, along with intuitive decisions, are at the root of his compositional process.
Among Kotik's best-known compositions are Music for 3 (1964) for piano and 2 strings; Spontano (1964) for piano and ensemble (composed for Frederic Rzewski
); Kontrabandt (1967), a live electronic work commissioned by the WDR Electronic Music Studio; Many Many Women (1975–78) on a text by Gertrude Stein
; and Letters to Olga (1988–91) on a text by Václav Havel
. His orchestra pieces include: Quiescent Form (1994–96); the one-hour long Music in Two Movements (1998–2002); Variations for 3 Orchestras (2002–2005); and Spheres and Attraction (2005–2006) for 2 voices, string quartet and percussion on a text by R. Buckminster Fuller.
"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.
He is married to the curator and art historian Charlotta Kotik, and has a son, Tomas (Tom), who is a New York-based sculptor. His other son, Jan Jakub Kotik, was born in 1972 and died of cancer in 2007.
Prague
Prague is the capital and largest city of the Czech Republic. Situated in the north-west of the country on the Vltava river, the city is home to about 1.3 million people, while its metropolitan area is estimated to have a population of over 2.3 million...
) is a composer
Composer
A composer is a person who creates music, either by musical notation or oral tradition, for interpretation and performance, or through direct manipulation of sonic material through electronic media...
, conductor and flutist living in New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
. He was educated in Europe (Prague Conservatory
Prague Conservatory
Prague Conservatory, sometimes also Prague Conservatoire, in Czech Pražská konzervatoř, is a Czech secondary school in Prague dedicated to teaching the arts of music and theater acting.- Instruction :...
, graduated 1961; Vienna Music Academy, graduated 1966; AMU Prague, graduated 1969). From 1960 to 1963, Kotik studied composition privately with Jan Rychlík
Jan Rychlík
Jan Rychlík was a Czech composer and music theorist. He was one of the most important exponents of the Czech New Music in the 1950s and 1960s.- Biography :...
in Prague, and from 1963 to 1966 at the Music Academy in Vienna with Karl Schieske, Hans Jelinek, and Friedrich Cerha
Friedrich Cerha
Friedrich Cerha is an Austrian composer and conductor.-Biography:Cerha was born in Vienna.He received his education at the Viennese Music Academy and at the University of Vienna...
. In Prague, he founded and directed Musica Viva Pragensis (1961–64) and the QUAX Ensemble (1966–69). He came to the United States in 1969 at the invitation of Lukas Foss
Lukas Foss
Lukas Foss was a German-born American composer, conductor, and pianist.-Music career:He was born Lukas Fuchs in Berlin, Germany in 1922. His father was the philosopher and scholar Martin Fuchs...
and Lejaren Hiller
Lejaren Hiller
Lejaren Arthur Hiller was an American composer. In 1957 he collaborated on the first significant computer music composition, Illiac Suite, with Leonard Issacson. It was his fourth string quartet. In 1958 he founded the Experimental Music Studio at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign...
to join the Center for Creative and Performing Arts at the University at Buffalo
University at Buffalo, The State University of New York
University at Buffalo, The State University of New York, also commonly known as the University at Buffalo or UB, is a public research university and a "University Center" in the State University of New York system. The university was founded by Millard Fillmore in 1846. UB has multiple campuses...
.
Since 1983, Kotik has been living in New York City. Kotik is the founder and Artistic Director of the S.E.M. Ensemble
S.E.M. Ensemble
S.E.M. Ensemble is a leading American group dedicated to the performance of contemporary classical music. It was founded in 1970 by the Czech composer Petr Kotik, who serves as its director, and is based in New York City....
, 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
National Endowment for the Arts
The National Endowment for the Arts is an independent agency of the United States federal government that offers support and funding for projects exhibiting artistic excellence. It was created by an act of the U.S. Congress in 1965 as an independent agency of the federal government. Its current...
, among others, and in 1996, he received the prestigious composition award from Foundation for Contemporary Arts
Foundation for Contemporary Arts
Foundation for Contemporary Arts , originally known as Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts, is a nonprofit based foundation in New York City founded by artists Jasper Johns , John Cage, Elaine de Kooning and others in 1963. FCA offers financial support and recognition to contemporary...
. He is also known for his realization of the complete musical works of Marcel Duchamp
Marcel Duchamp
Marcel Duchamp was a French artist whose work is most often associated with the Dadaist and Surrealist movements. Considered by some to be one of the most important artists of the 20th century, Duchamp's output influenced the development of post-World War I Western art...
.
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 is composed in the minimal
Minimalist music
Minimal music is a style of music associated with the work of American composers La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, and Philip Glass. It originated in the New York Downtown scene of the 1960s and was initially viewed as a form of experimental music called the New York Hypnotic School....
vein, with works often being of long duration and featuring slow tempi and quiet dynamics. Though his works feature innumerable gradual, slight changes, giving them a seemingly static quality, his harmonies, however, are more complex than those employed by many other American minimal composers, and his musical process
Process music
Process music is music that arises from a process. It may make that process audible to the listener, or the process may be concealed. Primarily begun in the 1960s, diverse composers have employed divergent methods and styles of process...
is not as apparent to the listener as, for example, in the works of Steve Reich
Steve Reich
Stephen Michael "Steve" Reich is an American composer who together with La Monte Young, Terry Riley, and Philip Glass is a pioneering composer of minimal music...
or Philip Glass
Philip Glass
Philip Glass is an American composer. He is considered to be one of the most influential composers of the late 20th century and is widely acknowledged as a composer who has brought art music to the public .His music is often described as minimalist, along with...
. Further, Kotik does not draw as heavily on jazz
Jazz
Jazz is a musical style that originated at the beginning of the 20th century in African American communities in the Southern United States. It was born out of a mix of African and European music traditions. From its early development until the present, jazz has incorporated music from 19th and 20th...
or rock
Rock and roll
Rock and roll is a genre of popular music that originated and evolved in the United States during the late 1940s and early 1950s, primarily from a combination of African American blues, country, jazz, and gospel music...
in his works as do many of his American colleagues (though, like Steve Reich, he is quite interested in Medieval music
Medieval music
Medieval music is Western music written during the Middle Ages. This era begins with the fall of the Roman Empire and ends sometime in the early fifteenth century...
and often integrates Medieval compositional techniques into his works). These qualities set Kotik's music apart from American minimal trends, giving his music a decidedly European character more similar in outlook to, for example, that of Hungarian minimalists such as Zoltán Jeney
Zoltán Jeney
Zoltán Jeney is a Hungarian composer.Jeney first studied piano and attended Pongrácz's composition classes at the Debrecen Secondary Music School, later continuing composition studies with Ferenc Farkas at the Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music in Budapest , and the pursuing postgraduate studies with...
, László Sáry
László Sáry
László Sáry is a Hungarian composer and pianist. In the 1970s he began composing in a minimal style.-External links:**...
, or László Vidovszky
László Vidovszky
The native form of this personal name is Vidovszky László. This article uses the Western name order.László Vidovszky is a Hungarian composer and pianist...
.
Among Kotik's best known works is the six-hour opera Many Many Women (1976–78), based on a text by Gertrude Stein
Gertrude Stein
Gertrude Stein was an American writer, poet and art collector who spent most of her life in France.-Early life:...
, for whose work, appropriately, Kotik has a special affinity.
As a performer, Kotik has been an active chamber musician throughout much of his life. Until 1992, Kotik did not have the slightest interest in orchestra. That changed in 1992, when he conducted Atlas Eclipticalis by John Cage
John Cage
John Milton Cage Jr. was an American composer, music theorist, writer, philosopher and artist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde...
with the 86-piece Orchestra of the S.E.M. Ensemble in Tribute to John Cage at Carnegie Hall
Carnegie Hall
Carnegie Hall is a concert venue in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, United States, located at 881 Seventh Avenue, occupying the east stretch of Seventh Avenue between West 56th Street and West 57th Street, two blocks south of Central Park....
, with David Tudor
David Tudor
David Eugene Tudor was an American pianist and composer of experimental music.- Biography :Tudor was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He studied piano with Irma Wolpe and composition with Stefan Wolpe and became known as one of the leading performers of avant garde piano music. He gave the...
as the soloist. 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
Karlheinz Stockhausen
Karlheinz Stockhausen was a German composer, widely acknowledged by critics as one of the most important but also controversial composers of the 20th and early 21st centuries. Another critic calls him "one of the great visionaries of 20th-century music"...
, Kotik initiated a project of compositions for 3 orchestras and commissioned the creation of new 3-orchestra works by Alvin Lucier
Alvin Lucier
Alvin Lucier is an American composer of experimental music and sound installations that explore acoustic phenomena and auditory perception. A long-time music professor at Wesleyan University, Lucier was a member of the influential Sonic Arts Union, which included Robert Ashley, David Behrman, and...
, Christian Wolff
Christian Wolff (composer)
Christian G. Wolff is an American composer of experimental classical music.-Biography:Wolff was born in Nice in France to German literary publishers Helen and Kurt Wolff, who had published works by Franz Kafka, Robert Musil, and Walter Benjamin. After relocating to the U.S...
, Martin Smolka
Martin Smolka
Martin Smolka is a contemporary Czech composer of classical music.- Works :1983* Slzy ;1985-19881988* Music for Retuned Instruments;1989* Zvonění for solo percussion;* Nocturne;...
, Phill Niblock
Phill Niblock
Phill Niblock is a composer, filmmaker, videographer, and director of Experimental Intermedia, a foundation for avant-garde music based in New York with a parallel branch in Ghent, Belgium.-Biography:...
and Olga Neuwirth
Olga Neuwirth
Olga Neuwirth is an Austrian composer.As a child at the age of seven, Neuwirth began lessons on trumpet. She later studied composition in Vienna at the Vienna Academy of Music and Performing Arts under Erich Urbanner, while studying at the Electroacoustic Institute...
. In 2001, Kotik founded the biennial Ostrava Days, an Institute and Festival of New Music in Ostrava
Ostrava
Ostrava is the third largest city in the Czech Republic and the second largest urban agglomeration after Prague. Located close to the Polish border, it is also the administrative center of the Moravian-Silesian Region and of the Municipality with Extended Competence. Ostrava was candidate for the...
, Czech Republic. This three-week program, one of the largest in existence, focuses on works for orchestra, with 2 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. This was due to his lack of interest in classical harmony, a tendency shared with other composers such as Christian Wolff and John Cage. As a composer, Kotik is essentially self-taught, in spite of his education in composition fundamentals in Prague and Vienna. His technique has very little to do with commonly-used compositional methods.
Kotik's compositional system can be compared to a game in which the use of controlled chance is balanced by conscious decision-making. The two alternate, one influencing the other. In this way Kotik triggers unpredictable processes while the work progresses in the envisioned direction. In recent years, Kotik has relied increasingly on intuitive gestures. The strategies and limitations Kotik imposes on chance, along with intuitive decisions, are at the root of his compositional process.
Among Kotik's best-known compositions are Music for 3 (1964) for piano and 2 strings; Spontano (1964) for piano and ensemble (composed for Frederic Rzewski
Frederic Rzewski
Frederic Anthony Rzewski is an American composer and virtuoso pianist.- Biography :Rzewski began playing piano at age 5. He attended Phillips Academy, Harvard and Princeton, where his teachers included Randall Thompson, Roger Sessions, Walter Piston and Milton Babbitt...
); Kontrabandt (1967), a live electronic work commissioned by the WDR Electronic Music Studio; Many Many Women (1975–78) on a text by Gertrude Stein
Gertrude Stein
Gertrude Stein was an American writer, poet and art collector who spent most of her life in France.-Early life:...
; and Letters to Olga (1988–91) on a text by Václav Havel
Václav Havel
Václav Havel is a Czech playwright, essayist, poet, dissident and politician. He was the tenth and last President of Czechoslovakia and the first President of the Czech Republic . He has written over twenty plays and numerous non-fiction works, translated internationally...
. His orchestra pieces include: Quiescent Form (1994–96); the one-hour long Music in Two Movements (1998–2002); Variations for 3 Orchestras (2002–2005); and Spheres and Attraction (2005–2006) for 2 voices, string quartet and percussion on a text by R. Buckminster Fuller.
"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
Kyle Gann
Kyle Eugene Gann is an American professor of music, critic and composer born in Dallas, Texas. As a critic for The Village Voice and other publications he has been a supporter of progressive music including such Downtown movements as postminimalism and totalism.- As composer :As a composer his...
, The Village Voice
The Village Voice
The Village Voice is a free weekly newspaper and news and features website in New York City that features investigative articles, analysis of current affairs and culture, arts and music coverage, and events listings for New York City...
1998).
Kotik's music is available on the Labor, Dog w/a Bone and Ear-Rational labels.
He is married to the curator and art historian Charlotta Kotik, and has a son, Tomas (Tom), who is a New York-based sculptor. His other son, Jan Jakub Kotik, was born in 1972 and died of cancer in 2007.