Acclaimed composer Karel Husa will be awarded an honorary doctorate at a concert featuring several of his works performed by UCA?s Wind Ensemble at 7:30 p.m., Wednesday, April 19 in the Reynolds Performance Hall. A reception for Husa will be held in the Brewer-Hegeman Conference Center following the program. Both the concert and the reception are free and open to the public.
Husa will receive the degree after the first work is performed, and the hooding will occur onstage.
Born in Prague on August 7, 1921, Husa?s life has geographically followed a course dictated by others. Narrowly escaping forced labor in a German factory in 1941, he continued studies at the Prague Conservatory until the final year of the war when all classes were suspended until Allied liberation in 1945. In 1946, he traveled to Paris, honing his composition and conducting skills with the French masters of the day and earning accolades (both as a composer and conductor) from the international press. In 1949, the communist government of Czechoslovakia rescinded his passport and made him a man without a country.
In 1953, he conducted his first European recording of Bart?k?s The Miraculous Mandarin. In 1954, famed American musicologist Donald Grout invited Husa to America. Cornell University granted him tenure and he remained there nearly 40 years. In the ensuing years, Husa was awarded numerous awards and honors, including the Pulitizer Prize in Music (Third String Quartet), the Grawemeyer Award (Cello Concerto), the Friedheim Award (Recollections), and the Sudler Award (Concerto for Wind Ensemble).
The output of Husa remains forever exciting and challenging. Of the 1987 premiere of his Concerto for Orchestra by the New York Philharmonic, Musical America wrote: ?This is a work fervent and luminous?there is much in this concerto which recalls the intensity of Bart?k and the mystical elegance of Mahler?but there is no sense of the derivative in Husa?s rhetoric; his language is personal and deeply felt.?
The program in tribute to Husa is sponsored by UCA?s Department of Music and the College of Fine Arts and Communication.
