Frank Martin

Martin’s long, silently productive profession reflected a mission to reconcile creative imperatives with stylistic integrity within an period of unprecedented complex difficulties, tests, and fragmentation. A conventionally qualified musician could have been much less prone to brook such difficulties as an honest dilemma or even to observe in them an nearly paralyzing selection of options, while Martin, the tenth kid of the Calvinist pastor, experienced both keenly. Martin started composing at 8, was overwhelmed with a overall performance of Bach’s St. Matthew Enthusiasm at 10, and by his 16th 12 months understood that music was his future. While formally learning mathematics and physics at his parents’ behest, he pursued music privately using the recognized Swiss composer Joseph Lauber, who launched him towards the rudiments of piano, tranquility, and structure. Martin became an capable interpreter on the piano and harpsichord and, in afterwards lifestyle, proved sufficiently equipped to produce a definitive documenting of his challenging Preludes (8) for piano. In 1918 Martin shifted to Zurich, after that to Rome and Paris, time for Geneva in 1926 with the knowledge of jazz popular in the hearing. A gathering that season with Émile Jaques-Dalcroze, creator of eurhythmics, proceeded to go hand-in-hand with exploration of Hindu and Bulgarian rhythms, issuing in the orchestral triptych Rhythmes (1926) some rhythmic nervosité being a continual feature of his music. Modal and serial components also up to date his work without having to be slavishly adopted. How the pretty prolific Martin attained his first feature function — the secular oratorio Le vin natural herbé (1938-1941) — just as he handed his 50th season owes as very much, perhaps, towards the German-dominated insularity of Swiss musical lifestyle regarding the search for a perfect purity of utterance. The influence of Debussy and Ravel, for example, was taken to bear just through the Great Battle through the revelations of Swiss conductor Ernest Ansermet, who performed Martin’s Les dithyrambes in 1918 and became a champ of his function, making several traditional recordings from it. Reputation came by means of teaching content, directorship from the Technicum Moderne de Musique, leader from the Swiss Music artists’ Union 1943-1946, a structure class on the Cologne Hochschule für Musik 1950-1957, and commissions (e.g., by Geneva Radio for the oratorio In terra pax for broadcast on armistice time). In 1943 he wedded his third wife, Maria Boeke, and in 1946 shifted with her to Amsterdam, and afterwards to Naarden. Masterworks flowed from his pencil between concert trips that transported his music world-wide.