Ladislav Kupkovič

Ladislav Kupkovič (17 March 1936 – 15 June 2016) was a Slovak composer and conductor (Anon. 2016).

Kupkovič was born in Bratislava, and studied violin and conducting there, first at the conservatory, then at the Academy of Performing Arts. He played violin in the Slovak Philharmonic Orchestra from 1960 to 1965, and then began to write music for television and film to make a living. At the same time, he was writing more experimental music for concerts. In 1969 he won a music scholarship to West Berlin, and emigrated there the following year. In 1971, he conducted the premiere of 's Mixtur in Cologne, a piece dedicated to Kupkovič himself. In the same year, he began to teach music theory at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater Hannover, and lived in Haste near Hannover until his death. During the 1970s he was associated with the Cologne School (Kapko-Foretić 1980, 50).

Kupkovič has probably become best known for his experiments with the concert form in the 1970s. In Musik für das Ruhrfestspielhaus (1970), he arranged forty performers to play a number of pieces in a concert hall in Recklinghausen over the course of three hours. The pieces were played in various parts of the building, some of them at the same time. Kupkovič called this kind of concert a Wandelkonzert, and Wandelkonzerte have often invited comparisons to John Cage's Musicircus events. The idea was expanded for Klanginvasion auf Bonn (1971), for which 150 musicians played at various venues in Bonn over the course of twelve hours. There is some similarity here to Trevor Wishart's community pieces like Forest Singularity.

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