Detoni, Dubravko: de Musica

Croatian composer, pianist and writer Dubravko Detoni (Križevci, February 22, 1937) took his degree in piano and composition at the Music Academy in Zagreb, doing further studies in Siena, Warsaw, Darmstadt and Paris. He has written 140 opuses of orchestral, chamber, solo, vocal and electronic music, a number of multimedia projects and experiments, twelve books of poetry and essays, diaries and travelogues, series of radio and television programmes and many programme notes for concerts and recordings. He is the founder and artistic director of ACEZANTEZ – Ensemble of the Centre for New Tendencies Zagreb, with which since 1970 he has toured most European countries and parts of America and Asia.  ...  In his oeuvre of compositions one can observe a spiral circle that moves from dramatic post-Bartokian neo-Expressionism, draws on mature Polish sound, is refreshed with lyrical and poetic (and occasionally multimedial) surrealism of the new-beautiful and simple, and then across the ingenuities of the post-modernist log-bridge returns to the more recent acuities of post-avant-garde neo-structuralism. On the whole of this route the composer, always in a new way, experiences consonances assonantly and assonances consonantly. He understands points linearly and lines punctually, he gradual soothes extremes and reaches the extreme of the monotonic in dessin, sometimes getting into spaces of gestural mechanisation or the phenomenon of repetition, experiences the too much or too little known in a certain constellations of events as humorous and changes the meaning of citations. Every system for the composer is a need that every time has to be shaken off in a different way: closer to him than the subsequent is the simultaneous report, synchronous criticism of an actually ongoing process.