Udo Kasemets

Udo Kasemets
Born	(1919-11-16)November 16, 1919 Tallinn, Estonia
Origin	Tallinn
Died	January 19, 2014(2014-01-19) (aged 94) Toronto, Ontario
Genres	Classical music
Occupation(s)	Composer, conductor, pianist
Years active	1951–1987

Udo Kasemets (November 16, 1919 – January 19, 2014) was a Canadian composer of orchestral, chamber, vocal, piano and electroacoustic works. He was one of the first composers to adopt the methods of John Cage, and was also a conductor, lecturer, pianist, organist, teacher and writer.

Kasemets was born in Tallinn, Estonia, and trained at the Tallinn Conservatory and the Akademie der Musik in Stuttgart. In 1950, he attended the Kranichstein Institut für neue Musik in Darmstadt, where he became familiar with the music and philosophies of Ernst Krenek, Hermann Scherchen and Edgard Varèse. He emigrated to Canada in 1951, and became a Canadian citizen in 1957.

From the 1950s, Kasemets was active in Hamilton, Ontario and Toronto, Ontario in Canada. He taught at the Royal Hamilton College of Music and served as conductor of the Hamilton Conservatory Chorus, until 1957. He was music critic for the Toronto Daily Star 1959–63 and taught at the Brodie School of Music and Modern Dance 1963–67.

In 1962–63, he organized Toronto's first new music series Men, Minds and Music, and established the Isaacs Gallery Mixed Media Concerts. In 1968, he directed the first Toronto Festival of Arts and Technology entitled SightSoundSystems and founded and edited a new music publication series, Canavangard. In 1971, Kasemets joined the Faculty of the Department of Experimental Art at the Ontario College of Art, where he taught until retiring in 1987.

Kasemets' significant influences include Erik Satie, Marcel Duchamp, James Joyce, John Cage, James Tenney, Morton Feldman, Merce Cunningham, Buckminster Fuller, and Stephen Hawking. Other strong influences especially evident in his later work include the Chinese I Ching and fractal music.

Kasemets lived in Toronto, Ontario.

Selected works

• Requiem Renga, for the victims of wars and violence in our time (1992) for fifteen strings and two percussionists, based on the Japanese renga chain poetry form.
• Palestrina on Devil's Staircase, with Dis(Con)sonant Contrapuntal Connections (1993) for three violins, three cellos, and two sopranos, music based on the eponymous fractal and also commemorating the 400th anniversary of Palestrina's death in 1994.
• The Eight Houses of the I-Ching (1993) for twelve strings

Further reading

• Steenhuisen, Paul. "Interview with Udo Kasemets". In Sonic Mosaics: Conversations with Composers. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2009. ISBN 978-0-88864-474-9
• Tenney, James. "Citation for Udo Kasemets." MusicWorks (Spring 1995) : 62, 6–7.
• Kasemets, Udo. "Systems : Concise Summary of I Ching Systems. | I Ching Music John Cage and I Ching | I Ching and I." MusicWorks (Spring 1995) : 62, 7-21.

External links

• Udo Kasemets at IMDb
• Keillor, Elaine (25 February 2015). "Udo Kasemets". The Canadian Encyclopedia (online ed.). Historica Canada.
• Archival papers and manuscripts at University of Toronto Music Library
• http://composers21.com/compdocs/kasemetu.htm at The Living Composers Project