Martin Smolka

Born in 1959 in Prague, Martin Smolka entered the world of music in the early 1980s when he co-founded Agon — an ensemble that in the late 1980s and early 1990s was the most significant mediator of the world's musical avant-garde in the Czech scene, which at the time was dominated by the officially backed domestic pseudo-modernism. He studied composition at the Music Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague; also of crucial significance was his private tuition with Marek Kopelent.

In the early 1990s, Smolka became interested in unusual instrumental techniques and sound sources — deeply under-tuned strings, old gramophones, various objects used as percussion. He refers to some compositions from this period as "sonic photographs," such as Rain, a window, roofs, chimneys, pigeons and so… and railway bridges, too for large ensemble (1992). Metaphorically speaking, Smolka's music oscillates between two poles: cracked, buoyant conviviality — the music of a hobbling orchestrion, symptomatic sounds of civilization — on one side, and melancholic memories and aching nostalgia on the other.

In the late 1990s, Smolka turned his attention to the "recycling" of elements of traditional music, deformed through micro-intervals and arranged in collage fashion — as in Remix, Redream, Reflight for orchestra (2000) and Blue Bells or Bell Blues for orchestra (2011, awarded by the Foundation Prince Pierre de Monaco). Over recent decades he has also taken a keen interest in vocal music, including Poema de balcones for chorus (2008), Psalmus 114 for chorus and orchestra (2009), and Stretto for 6 singers and vibraphones (2019).

Smolka's music has been performed mainly outside the Czech Republic, the country in which he lives, by the most renowned European ensembles and festivals. In Prague, he is above all known for his opera Nagano, for which he received an Alfréd Radok Award. From 2003 to 2024 he taught composition in Brno; since 2023 he has been professor of composition in Prague.