Jan Málek

The author‘s method of working can be characterized as a confrontation of historical, mainly Renaissance, or folk material with the present-day compositional techniques.

He is a former student of Miloslav Kabeláč, with whom he studied first at the Prague Conservatory from 1958 to 1961, and then privately in the years 1963–1974. Already in 1956 he started studying at the Conservatory with the folklorist Albert Pek in the department of folk instruments, and he also specialised in percussion that he studied under Emil Špaček.

From 1963 he worked for the Czechoslovak Radio in Pilsen, first as a music director, and later on, in the years 1965–1976, as the dramaturge of the Pilsen Radio Orchestra.

Towards the end of the 1960s he was employed as a lector and dramaturge of an electro-acoustic laboratory. Since 1976 Jan Málek has been holding the position of music director of the Czechoslovak (now Czech) Radio in Prague.

As a composer he initially drew on the avant-garde of the so called New Music, yet he soon turned to early music and folklore. He focuses mainly on vocal music, an excellent example of which is his Homage to Michelangelo’s Hammer (Pocta kladivu Michelangelovu) for men’s choir, wind instruments and percussion from 1975. In the same year this piece was awarded in the UNESCO International Composers’ Tribune.

His compositions are regularly performed at the Prague Premieres Festival. Recently, it was his Sinfonie III. per B. in 2007 and in 2008 the third string quartet “The JK Gallery” (Galerie JK).

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