Ivan Vandor

Ivan Vandor, born in Pécs, Hungary, on 13 October 1932, is a Hungarian-born composer and ethnomusicologist who spent much of his career in Italy, the country to which he moved in 1938. His career combines avant-garde composition with field research that was rare among musicians of his generation, which explains the breadth of his musical language.

As a young man he began his musical studies, and in 1959 he obtained his diploma in composition at the Conservatory of Rome, where he was a pupil of Petrassi. Before devoting himself fully to academia, he played the saxophone in jazz bands and was a member of the improvisation group Music Elettronica Viva between 1965 and 1968. Between 1968 and 1970 he studied ethnomusicology at UCLA with Ki Mantle Hood and Charles Seeger. His fieldwork on the music of Tibetan Buddhism, carried out in monasteries in Nepal and northern India between 1970 and 1971, led to numerous articles and to the book La musique du Bouddhisme tibétain, published in Paris in 1976.

Institutionally, he directed the Internationales Institut für vergleichende Musikstudien in Berlin from 1976 to 1983, and founded the Scuola Interculturale di Musica in Venice, which he directed from 1979 to 1992. He was later appointed professor of composition at the Santa Cecilia Conservatory in Rome.

His output reflects this plural training: it moves through atonality, serialism, polytonality and tonality remembered within a chromatic context. Already in Esercizi for 23 wind instruments (1965) his distance from the complexities of the avant-garde that followed the Second World War is apparent. Vocal works such as Cronache 2 (1989) and Offrande II (1993) combine purely expressive sounds with linguistic material, within an organic structure in which timbre and form are balanced. His legacy lies in that synthesis between traditions of very different origins and contemporary Western music.