Jón Leifs

Jón Leifs was an extremely individual tone of voice who ushered in a method of Icelandic nationalism in music, very much just how Sibelius did in Finland. Not really that his music sounded anything like this of Sibelius: Leifs was a modernist, not as radical as Schoenberg and his disciples, but a originator of imaginative, frequently compelling scores which were not easy to get at. His music typically features string tremolos, chordal progressions that progress slowly, frequent usage of parallel fifths, aswell as thirds and fourths, and an frequently severe and primitive audio. He also commonly used folk melodies and designs, and like Bartók, produced several efforts to get folk designs. As an orchestrator he established himself aside from the majority of his contemporaries in his multi-colored manner of credit scoring and usage of primitive-sounding percussion musical instruments: anvil, stores, and even stones. His choral and vocal composing is often just like unusual, making tremendous demands in the performer, with complicated leaps and uncomfortably high records, and also other bewildering requirements. While Leifs’ music isn’t internationally popular, a lot of his compositions can be found on recordings, and restored curiosity about his works because the past due twentieth hundred years augurs well for his potential reputation. Leifs was created in Sólheimar, Iceland, on, may 1, 1899. From 1916 he examined composition on the Leipzig Conservatory in Germany with Aládar Szendrei and Paul Graener. He also examined piano and performing there, and graduated in 1921. Leifs mainly resided in Germany from 1916-1944 and went afoul from the Nazis through the last mentioned years of the period, due to his relationship to Jewish pianist Annie Riethof also to his progressive-sounding music. His 1941 Body organ Concerto received an unhealthy reception and soon after small of his music was performed in Germany. After settling in Sweden in 1944, Leifs and his wife divorced, and he came back to Iceland in 1945. Following drowning loss of life of his little girl in 1947, Leifs was motivated to write a number of important compositions, like the string quartet Vita et Mors as well as the shifting choral function Requiem. The 1950s had been a turbulent period for Leifs: due to the indegent reception of many older works, like the Saga-Symphony (1941-1942), he dropped all self-confidence in his compositional abilities; furthermore, his second relationship failed. Leifs rebounded after he wedded once again (1956) and thereafter created a string of extremely imaginative works, like the massive firmness poem for orchestra and chorus, Hekla (1961).