New publication to be seen on the website page videos: the Méditation sur deux thèmes de La Journée de l’Existence op. 7, with Katharina Gohl Moser, cello and Anton Kernjak, piano, produced by La Pataconera in february 2024 in Basle.
The American Festival of Microtonal Music in New-York made a compilation of several Ivan Wyschnegradsky’s works they had published in CDs during the last 30 years: https://johnnyreinhard.bandcamp.com/album/ivan-wyschnegradsky-pierce-jonas-tom-chiu-johnny-reinhard-dan-auerbach-soldier-string-quartet-american-festival-of-microtonal-music
If you are able to communicate the details of a concert, research or an event concerning Ivan Wyschnegradsky, we would be grateful for your informing us.
EDITO
NB Previous editos are available by clicking here.
Ivan Wyschnegradsky at Bayle seminar – 1967
We have just become aware of the letters that Ivan WYSCHNEGRADSKY had sent to Claude BALLIF during the 1970s and then in 1979.
This testimony of the very strong ties which united these two composers takes place first of all during the period when Ivan Wyschnegradsky accompanied his second wife Lucile Gayden, who was suffering, to the rest home in the South of France, where she would unfortunately die. Then again during the year 1979, while Claude Ballif was staying in Montreal in Canada, where he had exchanged for a year his position as professor of Analysis at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse de Paris with the Canadian composer Bruce MATHER who then taught at McGill University. In several of his letters to Claude Ballif, Ivan Wyschnegradsky signs “Your brother Ivan”… He also gives him a certain number of “exercises” to get used to quarter-tone writing.
Among these fifteen very moving letters, one of them was addressed by Ivan Wyschnegradsky in April 1979 to the Swedish composer Bengt HAMBRAEUS, in which he explains at length his interest in electronic music and tells him about the chart he had made on graph paper for a “Study for electronic broadcast”, a chart that he had sent to Professor Eimert, at this time Director of the electronic Music Studio at Cologne Radio (Germany).
This correspondence is in the Claude Ballif archives at the La Grange-Fleuret Musical Library – 11bis rue de Vézelay in Paris 75008 where you can consult it. On Saturday May 25 a whole day of conferences and concerts devoted to Claude Ballif’s works will be organized at this place.
At the head of this editorial, we attach a photo of the seminar which was held at the initiative of François Bayle in 1967 at the GRM (Musical Research Group founded by Pierre Schaeffer) and which Ivan Wyschnegradsky, then aged almost 75 years old, had wanted to attend…
Martine Joste – may 2024
IVAN WYSCHNEGRADSKY
‘I could have been a poet, a philosopher or a musician. I chose music: I am therefore a composer.’
Ivan Wyschnegradsky, born in Saint Petersburg in 1893, lived in Paris from 1920 until his death in 1979. Admired by numerous composers, amongst whom we can mention Olivier Messiaen, Henri Dutilleux, Bruce Mather, Alain Bancquart and Claude Ballif, Ivan Wyschnegradsky is recognized by the musical world as one of the pioneers in 20th century music.
Ivan Wyschnegradsky’s 1/4 tone piano, which in 1927 he had ordered from the August Förster manufacture, first was in the home of Claude Ballif, to whom he had bequeathed it. Since 2009 it belongs to the Paul-Sacher Foundation in Basel. Photo René Block (1979).