Jiří Kadeřábek

Biography

The music of composer Jiří Kadeřábek, “capturing a peculiarly evocative image” (New York Times), “well crafted and compelling with its playful banter” (New York Arts), “reminding of cubist paintings by Picasso” and “with the aim of nullification of progression and logical association, the establishment of timelessness” (BBC), has garnered numerous awards and nominations, been commissioned and performed by institutions, festivals, orchestras and ensembles in Europe, America and Asia, and broadcast by many radio and television stations. In it, Kadeřábek confronts various compositional approaches, applies computer assisted composition techniques and integrates the principles or fragments of historical as well as jazz, pop and rock music. He works frequently with microintervals, recorded real sounds integrated into the musical structure, and employs various theater elements. For the most part, his pieces contain a certain political or social accent and simultaneously a personal, even intimate message. Kadeřábek’s creative development was affected by the strong and living folk tradition of Eastern Moravia, where he was born in 1978, his numerous activities in the field of nonartificial music as well as other artistic disciplines and later also composition workshops, residencies and private consultations in the Czech Republic, the Netherlands, France, Italy, the USA and China. During his study of composition at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague, where in 2012 he received a Ph.D., he spent a year at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague and another year as a Fulbright Scholar at Columbia University in New York.