I was looking up the Hungarian composer Mátyás Seiber earlier on, to see if I could find any other examples of his "jazz work" apart from the 1957 collaboration Improvisations for Jazz Band and Symphony Orchestra, later recorded on an LP which included Stravinsky's Ebony Concerto and a longer work by Salzedo. Improvisations was interesting for how the two men divided up the responsibilities - Dankworth doing the orchestral part of the score and Seiber the jazz part - and also for the fact that structurally the work is based on a 12-note row or series.
Born in 1905, Seiber studied with Zoltán Kodály, probably best known for his Psalmus Hungaricus of 1923 - composed to celebrate the unification of Buda and Pest into a single metropolitan entity - with whom he remained a lifelong friend until his own tragic death in a car accident in South Africa, in 1960. He was also a friend of Bartók, and it has been said that in his own music he fused the compositional approaches of Bartók and Schoenberg. In fact he had begun composing using Schoenberg's 12-note method of composition as early as 1930 - one of the first to do so outside the Schoenberg circle - remarkably combining this method with jazz idioms of the time in what was arguably a very early example of what Gunther Schuller would class as Third Stream more than a quarter of a century later. This had enraged the Nazi authorities, who "exhibited" the results as examples of Entartete Musik - "degenerate music": Seiber was at the time teaching composition at the Hoch Conservatorium at Frankfurt - he would emigrate to England 4 years later, in 1935.
Anyway, I thought I'd just post this link - there are no details of performers or date of composition, but I thought it was rather sweet, and certainly an unexpected find:
Born in 1905, Seiber studied with Zoltán Kodály, probably best known for his Psalmus Hungaricus of 1923 - composed to celebrate the unification of Buda and Pest into a single metropolitan entity - with whom he remained a lifelong friend until his own tragic death in a car accident in South Africa, in 1960. He was also a friend of Bartók, and it has been said that in his own music he fused the compositional approaches of Bartók and Schoenberg. In fact he had begun composing using Schoenberg's 12-note method of composition as early as 1930 - one of the first to do so outside the Schoenberg circle - remarkably combining this method with jazz idioms of the time in what was arguably a very early example of what Gunther Schuller would class as Third Stream more than a quarter of a century later. This had enraged the Nazi authorities, who "exhibited" the results as examples of Entartete Musik - "degenerate music": Seiber was at the time teaching composition at the Hoch Conservatorium at Frankfurt - he would emigrate to England 4 years later, in 1935.
Anyway, I thought I'd just post this link - there are no details of performers or date of composition, but I thought it was rather sweet, and certainly an unexpected find:
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