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(b Montbrison, Loire, March 26, 1925; d Baden-Baden, January 5, 2016). French composer and conductor. Resolute imagination, force of will, and ruthless combativeness secured him, as a young man, a position at the head of the Parisian musical avant garde. His predecessors, in his view, had not been radical enough; music awaited a combination of Serialism with the rhythmic irregularity opened up by Igor Stravinsky and Olivier Messiaen. This call for a renewed modernism was widely heard and widely followed during the 1950s, but its appeal gradually weakened thereafter, and in the same measure his creativity waned. He began to be more active as a conductor, at first specializing in 20th-century music, but then, in the 1970s, covering a large and general repertory. Towards the end of that decade he turned his attention to an electro-acoustic music studio built for him in Paris, where he hoped to resume the effort to create a new musical language on a rational basis. After a brief hiatus, though, conducting became again his principal means of expressing his independence and clarity of vision....

(b Vienna, April 22, 1941). Austrian composer, conductor and stage director. He studied at the Vienna Hochschule für Musik (teaching diploma, 1965) with Schiske, von Einem and others and at the Paris Conservatoire (1967–9), where his teachers included Messiaen and Leibowitz; he also studied electro-acoustics with François Bayle and Pierre Schaeffer. He has worked as a freelance composer for Austrian Radio (from 1966) and taught at the Vienna Hochschule für Musik (from 1970, professor 1990). A founding member of the Groupe International de Musique Electroacoustique de Paris (1969), he also co-founded the K & K Experimentalstudio, Vienna (1975), which has staged many productions of his works, and the Gesellschaft für Elektroakustische Musik (1984, chair 1988–91). He has served as chair (1988–91) of the Austrian section of the ISCM and as a committee member for Austro Mechana (from ...

(b Venice, Nov 2, 1946; d Berlin, April 20, 2001). Italian conductor and composer. He combined medical studies at Padua with composition at the Venice Conservatory, where he became professor of contemporary and electronic music in 1972. Further studies with Bruno Maderna and Franco Donatoni were combined with conducting under Hans Swarowsky in Vienna. In 1975 he formed the Bruno Maderna Ensemble to perform contemporary music, and that year made his conducting début at the Royan Festival. His opera début was with Aida at Venice in 1978. For a time he made his name primarily as a composer, receiving commissions from various festivals in France, Germany and the Netherlands, and writing vocal and orchestral works and some chamber and electro-acoustic music. The influence of Donatoni was prominent, as well as a structural rigour characteristic of the Darmstadt school of the 1950s, but used in such a way as to allow the emergence of quasi-expressionist elements through a seductive tonal hedonism. His two-act opera ...