Pelecis, Georgs (1947)
Biography Works
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Georgs Pelēcis is one of the most
knowledgeable of musical scholars in Latvia, especially in the
fields of history and theory of counterpoint.
The composer was born on June 18th, 1947 in Riga. He
graduated the Piotr Tchaikovsky State Conservatory in Moscow in
Aram Khachaturjan`s composition class in 1970, and in 1977
he finished the music theory
post-graduate course with Vladimir Protopopov. As of 1970, he has
been a lecturer in the Music Theory Department at the then Latvian
State Conservatory, now the Latvian Academy of Music. In 1990 he
was elected to the stature of a professor. His main disciplines are
counterpoint and fugue.
Georgs Pelēcis’s work in the field of musicology is
noteworthy. In 1981, he defended his science of art candidate (now
doctorate of art) dissertation The Musical Forms of Jean de
Ockeghem and the Traditions of the Netherlands Polyphonic School.
In the specific sphere of polyphony he has been involved in more
than 30 scientific works – both in Western European (Middle Ages,
Renaissance, Baroque) and Latvian music history – papers,
presentations at international conferences in Riga, Moscow and
Rome. His other major scientific research paper Palestrina’s
Principles of Polyphony and Traditions of the Vocal Polyphonic Era
(Dr. habil. art, 1990) is held in high regard in the world and was
recognized with a medal at the International Palestrina Centre in
Rome, Italy in 1993. Georgs Pelēcis was the first president of the
Ancient Music Centre of Riga. The composer has worked in a creative
capacity at Oxford (1995, Corpus Christi College) and Cambridge
(1997, Gonville and Caius College) Universities. Pelēcis has also
received compositional commissions from the United Kingdom. His
symphonic music for the Roald Dahl story Jack and the Beanstalk was
performed in the Royal Albert Hall in London. His works have been
performed at the Al`ternativa festival in Moscow, and at the
Lockenhaus festival in Austria. One of his works, the concerto
Tomēr (Nevertheless), has received choreographic attention in
recent years. The ballet troupe Dance Alloy performed to the music
of the concerto in its entirety in a performance in Pittsburgh, USA
in 2000 under the direction of choreographer
Mark Taylor.
The musical tonality of Georgs Pelēcis seems to reverberate
some amazingly clear positive spirit. This very quality, whose
genetic ancestry can be found partly in Renaissance and Baroque
music and partly in the minimalist aesthetic, brings a spiritual
strength to the composer’s creative output and brings to Latvian
music a previously unknown, freshly breathing and pulsating
activity. From all the style classifications which the composer
himself and musical critics have given to his works, the most
precise would be new consonant music, where euphony is the harmonic
ideal. The composer as a personality and a creator distances
himself from the drama and the duality of the soul. His music has
nothing in common with stylization, although it reveals a deeply
understood knowledge of the music of past cultures. Georgs
Pelēcis’s musical path became clear at the very beginning, in the
70s, when similar creative tools (both the goal of creating new
works and the musical lexicon) amongst Latvian composers, at the
time including the new generation, were not standard and needed
honest defenses of the criteria of creative output.
