Dubravko Detoni (Križevci, 22 Februar, 1937) - composer, pianist and writer - completed the studies of piano under Svetislav Stanèiæ in 1960, and in 1965 graduated as a composer under Stjepan Šulek. He continued his training as a pianist in 1960 at the Accademia Musicale Chigiana in Siena under Guido Agosti and Alfred Cortot; as a composer, he studied under Witold Lutos³awski; in 1966-7 at the Higher Music School in Warsaw under GraŸyna Bacewicz; at the Experimental Studio of the Polish Radio in Warsaw in 1967. In 1970 he attended summer courses in Darmstadt under Karlheinz Stockhausen and György Ligeti, and worked with John Cage in Paris in 1970 and 1971.
The founder and art director of ACEZANTEZ, the Ensemble of the New Tendencies Center from Zagreb, he is both its author and pianist. They had several very successful tours of Europe, Asia and North America, participating in numerous well-known music festivals in centers of contemporary music. He has received numerous awards for his work both in Croatia and abroad, the principal ones among them: the Grand Prix of the 6th Biennale in Paris in 1969, Matica Hrvatska Award in 1970, Vladimir Nazor Award in 1971, La Tribune internationale des compositeurs -UNESCO, Paris in 1972, Premio Italia in Venice in 1973, the Bedøich Smetana Award in Prague in 1976, and others.
Detoni’s composing work has undergone several stages of development, from traditional heritage acquired through training to the adoption and use of certain principles of serial technique which would later have to cope with the practice of the so-called Polish school. His curiosity rooted in the said principles, Detoni searched for “another potential sense of music free of all set formulations”. As a result of this search, in the late 60s and 70s he was among the most prominent and interesting composers in Croatia, whose works (e.g. Figures And Surfaces, Elucubrations or the Graphics series) also aroused interest abroad. Ever since at the focus of Croatian contemporary music, Detoni would undergo various phases which nevertheless complemented each other, never resisting the temptation of his own curiosity which has always tested the limits. In Detoni’s case, this means that the sound as the expressive means became completely individualized and preferably tense, ranging from tone to noise, from noise to scream. By means of this sound, whose life is articulated between silence and silence, Detoni tests potential spatial, visual, literary associations. Experiments on the music scene (the 1975 Taboo probably the most complex among them) thus naturally followed from the composer’s theoretical and practical reflections. In this context, the composing technique only serves as a means and Detoni treats it as such, using it in accordance with the originating ideas. In a way, classical or graphic notation, serial tonal constructions or aleatory compositions, traditional formal principle or free form, original or prepared sound of an instrument, are all equally possible, and their final form will only be defined by their function. A delicate expression, a soft instrumental line of Detoni’s compositions from the late ‘80s, represents a certain stylization of a reverberating tradition a mature composer wanted to recognize. The appearance of this softness is definitely tied up with the general trends in music, with scream no longer a must among means of expression. The so-called Post-Modernism curbed the expressive pathos of the avant-garde by a new contingent of ideas and the bridges which did not seem to exist before. The 1988 Concerto For Piano And Orchestra is a proof of the composer’s and the pianist’s mastery, as well as of the composer’s ability to change the means of expression without changing the expression itself. On the other hand, having reached this expression, he has found the balance between himself and the surrounding world.
Web: http://www.mic.hr/MIC.786850:INDIVIDUALS:46751:11,ID